The Personal Health Survey.

Area of Science:

• Psychometrics
• Clinical Psychology
• Psychophysiology

Background:

• The Personal Health Survey (PHS) is a 200-item inventory.
• It comprises 12 empirically constructed scales assessing symptomatology.
• These scales relate to principal psychophysiological systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare base rates of item responding across five clinical groups.
• To factor analyze the PHS results to identify underlying factors.
• To compare the item composition of extracted factors across the general population and clinical subgroups.

Main Methods:

• Administered the PHS to 730 participants across five clinical groups.
• Compared item response base rates (True/False) between groups.
• Performed principal component factor analysis with Varimax rotation.

Main Results:

• Identified five orthogonal main factors from the overall population.
• Extracted and compared these five factors within each of the five clinical subgroups.
• Differences in item composition of factors across groups were analyzed.

Conclusions:

• The factor analysis provides a robust structure for the PHS.
• The identified factors aid in understanding psychophysiological symptomatology in clinical contexts.
• The study discusses administration, scoring, interpretation, and validation of the PHS scales.