Reliability and validity of the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20) in high school students in Wenchuan earthquake area

Objective:To provide information about some of the psychometric characteristics of Self-Reporting Questionnaire(SRQ-20,Chinese version).Methods:The Chinese verison of SRQ-20 and Beck Depression Inventory-2nd Edition(BDI-Ⅱ)were administered to 675 students who were about to take the national college entrance exam in Dujiangyan city,three weeks after the earthquake.Kuder-Richardson formulation was employed to estimate the inter-consistency of SRQ-20.And point-biserial correlation was calculated to indicate the item-total consistency.Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to examine the factorial construct.Moreover,the test of the association between the scores of SRQ-20 and BDI-Ⅱwas used to provide evidence of convergent construct of this instrument.Results:The KR-20 coefficient of the scale was 0.79.The item-total score correlations varied from 0.34 to 0.60,averagely reached 0.48.The correlation between the score of SRQ-20 and BDI- was 0.70.Exploratory factor analysis yielded a four-factor construct which explained 43.96% of total variance.Except item 1 and 5,the factor loading of the remained items were more than or near to 0.40.Conclusion:The results suggest the consistency reliability and criteria validity of Chinese SRQ-20 are adequate.However,the results of factor analysis from different researches are not consistent.This implies that it's more advisable to regard the scale as one-dimension rather than use the factor structure as sub-scales.