[The usefulness of the Health Status Questionnaire: D. Goldberg's GHQ-12 and GHQ-28 for diagnosis of mental disorders in workers].

The General Health Questionnaires, developed by D. Goldberg (GHQ-12 and GHQ-28), are self-administered screening instruments designed to detect current diagnosable changes in the mental health status and to identify cases of potential mental disorders leaving a detailed diagnosis to a psychiatric interview. The General Health Questionnaires were designed for the use in primary health care settings, in the general population surveys or in general medical practice. The validation studies of the Polish version of GHQ-12 and GHQ-28 are described. The internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach alpha) reached the value of 0.859 for GHQ-12 in the study of 2540 employees, and 0.934 for GHQ-28 in the group of 1108 employees. The coefficients obtained in our studies are comparable to those reported by other authors who carried out investigations in populations of various countries. Test-retest reliability (ru approximately 0.7) seems to be good enough, taking account of the fact that the methods presented are aimed at diagnosing the state of mental health and not its stable traits. Having obtained significant differences in scores assigned to patients examined in settings at different levels of health care (a significant increase in GHQ scores of patients examined in psychiatric clinic as compared to patients of primary health care settings) it may be concluded that the criteria validity of both questionnaires is satisfactory.