Testing the Approach to Dividing Psychological Distress Index SCL-9-NR into Criterial Levels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29038/2306-3971-2023-02-32-32Keywords:
psychological distress, SCL-9-NR, index, social research, classificationAbstract
The article discusses the methodic SCL-9-NR as a sociological test for measuring psychological distress level (the author is S. Dembitskyi). It is an adapted and validated version of the SCL-90-R is developed by L. Derogatis. Psychological distress index is a total score of the respondent answers to SCL-9-NR items. Its values vary from 0 to 27. S. Dembitskyi also proposes dividing the psychological distress index into criterial levels. Thus it is created an ordinal categorical variable that characterizes the respondent’s distress level and consists of three value labels: normal (psychological distress index values vary from 0 to 12), increased (psychological distress index values vary from 13 to 16) and high (psychological distress index values are 17 or more). Criterial levels are established empirically and based on the results of five studies conducted in 2015-2017. But the question is whether such division of the psychological distress index can be considered reasonable.
To test the approach to dividing the psychological distress index into criterial levels an alternative classification (LCA classification) is constructed using the latent class analysis. Then we compare the LCA classification with the division psychological distress index into criterial levels (classification by criterial levels). Both classifications are correlated, but they cannot be called similar. In particular, the LCA classification fails to correctly classify respondents with an increased distress level. Respondents with normal and high distress levels are mostly classified correctly. In addition, we can guess that the SCL-9-NR items may have different weights. This is not taken into account during the calculating of the psychological distress index of and its division into criterial levels. So we not only need to create an alternative classification of respondents by the distress level, but also need to calculate psychological distress index in a different way taking into account the different weights of the SCL-9-NR items.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Ruslana Moskotina, Mykola Sydorov, Yeliena Kovalska
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