The two scaled versions of the Chinese General Health Questionnaire: a comparative analysis.

The four scales of the Chinese 28-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), and the five scales of the Chinese GHQ-20 were separately subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (in individual sample analyses and simultaneous multi-sample analyses) based on four Chinese samples of 150 general psychiatric patients, 549 school teachers, 653 university undergraduates, and 1082 secondary school students. While the two scaled versions were comparable in discriminating patients from nonpatients, the five scales of the GHQ-20 assessing five correlated dimensions were interpreted as mapping salient symptom areas in the Hong Kong Chinese population as they were empirically derived in the Chinese setting. The need for using samples from different cultural settings in multi-sample confirmatory analysis was discussed.