The Symptom Checklist–90–Revised (SCL-90-R) is a widely used assessment of mental health pathology; however, its factor structure has been called into question by numerous studies. This study assessed a community mental health outpatient sample (N = 336) with the SCL-90-R and analyzed the factor structure. The results indicated that the SCL-90-R measures one large factor, but the test items held together reasonably well when a nine-factor extraction was executed. A shorter 67-item variant, which was a by-product of this study, is hypothesized as having some key advantages over the original 90-item version. Implications for the assessment of the outpatient population with the SCL-90-R and its variants are discussed.
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