Electronic Short Device of Mental Health Problems for the first secondary adolescents - teacher form

Due to the importance of identifying changes in students' mental health and the need for screening using accurate and valid tools appropriate to the ecological characteristics of Iranian society, the researchers decided to develop a short-scale electronic version of psychological health problems - teacher form for junior high school students. The statistical population of this study consists of junior high school students in 31 provinces of the country. In each province, two cities were selected by purposive sampling method and in each city, two schools were selected by simple random method and all junior high school students entered the sample group The sample consisted of 11,484 students (6,403 girls and 5,081 boys). Item analysis indicated appropriate psychometric properties for most items. The results of confirmatory factor analysis also showed that the eight-component model with forty items based on experts' views shows the best fit with the data. The standard path coefficients of the items were obtained between 0.34 and 0.87, which indicates the appropriate divergent validity and also the average variance extracted (between 0.46 and 0.73) of the items also indicates their convergent validity. The validity of the subscales was also optimally obtained based on the combined validity coefficient (between 0.83 and 0.93) and Cronbach's alpha (between 0.80 and 0.93). In other words, the short scale has the necessary internal coherence. The correlation between the components and with the total score was in the acceptable range. Comparing the factor structure of the girl and boy groups indicates a suitable and equivalent fit for both groups. Therefore, it can be concluded that psychometric properties indicate the appropriateness of the short form of the Mental Health Questionnaire for use in the screening process in the first grade high school students in Iran.