[Factorial structure of the general health questionnaire (GHQ-30)]

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was designed by Goldberg in the 1970's as a screening instrument to provide information on the mental wellbeing. Although it is widely used as a unidimensional instrument, factor analyses tend to suggest that it contains more than one dimension.

The purpose of this paper is to review the factor-analytic research that has been carried out with regard to the 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30) and to present the results of the analysis of our research.

A total of 623 patients suffering from neurotic disorders and somatic illnesses were included into the study, 130 men and 493 women at the age ranged from 17 to 85 years old. A total score was calculated with Likert's method. The principal factor analysis with orthogonal varimax normalised rotation was used. Results. The GHQ-30 was found to have high internal consistency as a scale and high item-total correlations for most of the items. The factorial analysis showed that three factors labelled as the followed can be abstracted from the scale: depression and anxiety, interpersonal relations, general functioning. These factors jointly account for 58% of the variance.

Results showed both multifactorial (at the level of a lower order) and unifactorial (at the level of an upper order) structure of the GHQ-30.