Department of Psychology, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Republic of Korea.
Psychiatry Investig. 2012 Sep;9(3):236-44. doi: 10.4306/pi.2012.9.3.236. Epub 2012 Sep 6.
Delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD) is a condition in which patients often fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning. Circadian chronotype questionnaires such as Horne-Östberg Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) and Basic Language Morningness (BALM) scale have been used for screening for DSPD. This study was to evaluate these two chronotype questionnaires for screening of DSPD.
The study samples were 444 DSPD and 438 controls. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated to evaluate for internal consistency. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted using principal-axis factoring. The diagnostic performance of a test was evaluated using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. A discriminant function analysis was also performed.
For internal consistency, Cronbach's alpha of 0.898 for BALM was higher than the 0.837 for MEQ, though both have acceptable internal consistency. BALM has better construct validity than the MEQ because some MEQ items measure different dimensions. However, when we evaluated the efficiency of two questionnaires for DSPD diagnosis by using the ROC curve, the BALM was similar to the MEQ. In a discriminant analysis with the BALM to classify the two groups (DSPD vs. normal), 6 items were identified that resulted in good classification accuracy. Upon examination of the classification procedure, 94.2% of the originally grouped cases were classified correctly.
These findings suggest that the BALM has better psychometric properties than the MEQ in screening and discriminating DSPS.
延迟睡眠期障碍（DSPD）是一种患者经常在午夜过后几小时入睡，并且早上难以醒来的病症。诸如 Horne-Östberg 晨型-晚型问卷（MEQ）和基本语言晨型（BALM）量表等昼夜节律时型问卷已被用于 DSPD 的筛查。本研究旨在评估这两种时型问卷用于 DSPD 的筛查。
研究样本包括 444 例 DSPD 和 438 例对照。采用克朗巴赫α系数评估内部一致性。采用主成分因子分析进行探索性因子分析。采用接收者操作特征（ROC）曲线分析评估测试的诊断性能。还进行了判别函数分析。
对于内部一致性，BALM 的克朗巴赫α为 0.898，高于 MEQ 的 0.837，但两者均具有可接受的内部一致性。BALM 比 MEQ 具有更好的结构效度，因为一些 MEQ 项目测量不同的维度。然而，当我们使用 ROC 曲线评估两种问卷对 DSPD 诊断的效率时，BALM 与 MEQ 相似。在使用 BALM 对两组（DSPD 与正常）进行分类的判别分析中，确定了 6 项具有良好分类准确性的项目。在对分类过程的检查中，94.2%的原始分组病例得到正确分类。
这些发现表明，BALM 在筛查和区分 DSPS 方面具有比 MEQ 更好的心理测量特性。
