Study on the short version of general maladjustment scale and its reliability and validity

Objective To conduct item analysis on General Maladjustment Scale (Gm) and to develop a short-versioned scale.Methods Gm and Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) were administered to 3767 recruits.difficulty and discrimination of each item of Gm were calculated,correlation between item score and total score was analyzed,short-versioned Gm was developed based on the results of item analysis.Cronbach's α coeffieient of the original scale and the short-versioned scale was calculated, criterion validity was analyzed using SCL-90 as the validity criterion.Results Difficulty of the original scale was from 0.03 to 0.72.21 items'difficultv was less than 0.20.Discrimination index was from -0.19 to 0.45.21 items'discrimination index was less than 0.30.Corre.lation coefficient of the item score and the total score is from -0.17 to 0.48.21 items'correlation coefficient was less than 0.30.The short-versioned scale was made up of the 16 items with better quality.Cronbach's α coeffi.cient of the original scale and the short-versioned scale was 0.713 and 0.700.respectively.Both the total score of the original scale and the short-versioned scale were significantly correlated with the scores of SCL-90,and all the correlation coefficient were above 0.40.The correlation coefficient between the score of the short-versioned scale and that of the original scale was 0.914.Conclusion Both the original scale and the short-versioned scale have a higher reliability and good validity. Key words: Military psychology;  Maladjustment; Psychometrics;  Reliability; Validity