title: 30-item General Health Questionnaire in general hospitals: selecting items using a stepwise hierarchical procedure.
abstract: An attempt was made to improve the validity of the 30-item General Health Questionnaire by excluding items. This exclusion was performed by using correlations of sum-scores with an external case criterion. This hierarchical approach based on subsets of items (stepwise hierarchical variable selection) resulted in a 9-item questionnaire whose discriminating performance was significantly better than that of the original version.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Vienna, Austria. johannes.wancata@akh-wien.ac.at
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wancata
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Alexandrowicz
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Benda
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001317:Austria / Q000453:epidemiology; D006769:Hospitals, General / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D014600:Utilization Review / Q000379:methods*