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A Spanish version of the Athens Insomnia Scale
Juana Gómez-Benito1, Cristina Ruiz, Georgina Guilera
1Department of Methodology and Behavioural Sciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Objectives:
To develop and validate a Spanish version of the Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS).
Methods:
The AIS is designed to assess sleep difficulty and comprises eight items: the first five refer to the sleep disturbance and the last three to the daytime consequences. Either the full eight-item scale (AIS-8) or the brief form (AIS-5) can be administered. The adaptation used a back-translation design. The validation process was based on a sample of 323 participants (undergraduates, community sample and psychiatric outpatients), which completed the AIS and other questionnaires: anxiety (BAI), depression (BDI) and psychological well-being (GHQ-12) scales.
Results:
The internal consistency coefficients for both versions were above 0.80. The study of dimensionality revealed a single factor with high loadings and a percentage of explained variance above 50% in both versions. Test-retest reliability was above 0.70 (AIS-5) and over 0.80 (AIS-8) at a one-month interval. The correlation between the AIS and the previously mentioned scales was for both the AIS-5 and the AIS-8 above 0.40 and 0.50, respectively.
Conclusion:
The psychometric properties of both versions of the Spanish form of the AIS demonstrate that the scale is a valid and reliable instrument for the assessment of insomnia in Spanish-speaking populations.
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