Validity of the repeated GHO among pregnant women: a study in a Japanese general hospital.

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.