Development of the new Mental Health Scale for the Japanese Disaster Victims and Supporters

Abstract

The assessment of mental health is becoming the center of attention in disaster victims and supporters of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. Although there were many mental health scales, those possessed several problems to apply to them, e.g., troublesome tasks accompanied by many items. The purpose of this study was to develop the new mental health scale (Rikkyo University version: MH-R), and to examine the reliability and validity. Subjects were 328 Japanese college students (192 males and 136 females, 19.6 ± 1.2 years). They answered three scales, the MH-R (ten items), GHQ28 (Nakagawa & Daibo, 1985), and CES-D (Shima et al., 1985). As the results of exploratory factor analyses, three factors [low negative response (?=.77), vivid response (?=.86), calm response (?=.67)] were chosen finally. The result of confirmatory factor analysis showed the validity of the hierarchical model was fit to the data. There were significant negative correlations between the MH-R scores and the GHQ28 (r=-.59) or CES-D scores (r=-.52). It was suggested that the MH-R had the adequate reliability and validity. Then, the scale should be examined through the data including adulthood and senior persons.