Reliability and factorial structure of the Chinese version of the General Health Questionnaire

The Chinese version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was administered to 2,150 Chinese secondary school students. The GHQ was found to have high internal consistency as a scale and high item‐total correlations for most of the items. Factor analysis with a five‐factor solution showed that five factors were abstracted from the scale, namely, anxiety, depression, inadequate coping, interpersonal dysfunctioning, and sleep disturbances. By randomly splitting the total sample into two subsamples, these five factors could be reproduced reliably, and high coefficients of congruence were found. The psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the GHQ and the implications of the findings were discussed.