title: Construct validity of a health questionnaire intended to measure the subjective experience of health among patients in mental health services.
abstract: Mental health services have been lacking systematic health-promoting activities, and health is often perceived as the absence of disease from a biomedical perspective. It is vital to develop methods to assess perceived health among patients in a broader perspective. The aim of the study was to investigate construct validity of a newly developed health questionnaire intended to measure subjectively experienced health among patients in mental health services. A cross-sectional study, including a randomly selected sample of 139 outpatients in contact with the mental health services, was performed in order to explore the relationship between perceived health and self-reported levels of self-esteem, symptoms, empowerment, quality of life and experiences of stigmatization. Self-esteem, symptoms, empowerment and quality of life altogether accounted for 70% of the variation in overall perceived health. Overall perceived health showed positive associations to self-esteem, empowerment and quality of life and negative associations to psychiatric symptoms, discrimination and rejection experiences. The findings suggest that perceived health as measured by the health questionnaire can be a meaningful and valid construct that may be useful for measuring health in clinical mental healthcare practice and in mental health services research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Sciences, Lund Unviersity, Lund, Sweden. henrika.Jormfeldt@lthalland.se
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Jormfeldt
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Arvidsson
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Svensson
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hansson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D008875:Middle Aged; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012647:Self-Assessment; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013548:Sweden