The Validity and Reliability of the Turkish Version of the Brief Irritability Test

Although irritability is a widely used term, it has no universal definition. Irritability is an emotional process that can be defined by a tendency to negative emotional states. No Turkish scale has been developed or adapted to measure irritability in adults. Consequently, this paper aims to conduct a validity and reliability study of the Turkish version of the Brief Irritability Test (BITe) with 5 items, which was developed by Holtzman et al. in 2015 to measure irritability rapidly and appropriately.

The Turkish BITe's internal consistency and validity analysis were studied on 136 volunteering undergraduate and postgraduate students. Cronbach's alpha value was calculated for internal consistency. Concurrent, convergent, discriminant validity analyses, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted to calculate structural validity. Moreover, the scale was applied to 24 people 2 weeks later to determine the temporal reliability of the Turkish BITe.

When the fit indices of the scale related to the CFA were examined, it was observed that it had a good fit (χ ² = 7.517, χ ²/df = 1.503, df = 5; RMSEA = 0.061; CFI = 0.992, GFI = 0.977, NFI = 0.976; TLI = 0.984, IFI = 0.992). In the reliability analysis, the Cronbach's alpha value was 0.86, and the correlation coefficient between test-retest scores was 0.74 (P < .001).

This study reveals that the Turkish form of the BITe shows sufficient psychometric properties in the non-clinical population.