Validity of the Repeated Ghq among Pregnant Women: A Study in a Japanese General Hospital

Abstract

Objective:

The authors examined the variability of the validity of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) on two different occasions.

Method:

The subjects were 120 pregnant women attending an antenatal clinic of a general hospital in Japan. The GHQ was distributed twice—in the first and third trimesters. They were then interviewed by a psychiatrist blind to the GHQ scores using the standard and the “change” version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (SADS).

Results:

Of the 120 women, 108 and ninety-eight completed the GHQ and were successfully interviewed in the first and third trimesters, respectively. Seventeen percent (18/108) and 13 percent (13/98) women were given RDC diagnoses in the first and third trimesters, respectively: They were designated as cases. Despite a satisfactory discriminatory power of the GHQ on the first occasion [1], the validity measures of the GHQ on the second occasion were generally poor. Thus, the sensitivity was 39 percent and specificity 82 percent for the cut-off point of 7/8.

Conclusions:

The GHQ should be validated separately when distributed repeatedly to the same subjects.