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A comparison of the validity of GHQ-12 and CHQ-12 in Chinese primary care patients in Manchester

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Pey-Chyou Pan*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Manchester
David P. Goldberg
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Manchester
*
1Address for correspondence: Dr Pey-Chyou Pan; Department of Psychiatry, Queen Mary Hospital, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.

Synopsis

The present study compares the efficacy of the GHQ-12 and the Chinese Health Questionnaire (CHQ–12) in Cantonese speaking Chinese primary-care patients living in Greater Manchester, using relative operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. We did not find that the Chinese version offered any advantage over the conventional version of the GHQ in this population. Stepwise discriminant analysis however confirmed the value of individual items in the former pertaining to specific somatic symptoms and interpersonal relationships in differentiating cases from non-cases. Information biases, arising from the lack of a reliability study on the second-stage case identifying interview and the unique linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language may have affected the overall validity indices of the questionnaires. The study also examines the effects of using different criteria to define a case, and shows that with increasing levels of severity, there is an improvement in the diagnostic performance of the two questionnaires as reflected by areas under ROC curves and traditional validity indices. Possible explanations of these findings are discussed. The scoring method proposed by Goodchild & Duncan-Jones (1985) when used on these questionnaires had no demonstrable advantage over the conventional scoring method.

Type
Orginal Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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