Construct validity and reliability of Symptom Checklist-25 (SCL-25)

Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) is a mostly applied tool in studying mental health domain. Despite researchers interest for employing this tools high number of items restricted this process. The aim of current study was to investigate the factor structure, divergent validity and reliability of SCL-25. By employing a correlative design and test validation, 1076 person (523 female and 553 male) were selected among all employed people in North Khorasan educational organization by employing multistage cluster sampling. They completed SCL-25, short form of Psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989) and short form of social well-being (Keyes, 1998). Investigating the validity was performed by employing exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and also divergent validity and reliability was investigating through internal consistency, Cronbach alpha and split-half method. For this aim SPSS version 17 and LISREL version 8.54 were used. Finding related to exploratory factor analysis with principal components and varimax rotations confirms 7 factor structure for SCL-25 that can justify for 82.16 percent of the variance. Also confirmatory factor analyses show a good fitness with 7 factor fundamental model. In addition as there was a negative significant relationship (P<0.05) between sub variables of SCL-25, psychological and social well-being, divergent validity of SCL-25 was confirmed. Furthermore there was a positive significant relationship between subscales of SCL-25. Also it produces a high Cronbach alpha (0.71 to 0.95) and split-half coefficient (0.65 to 0.96) for subscales and the whole scale score. It seems that seven factor structure of SCL-25 can perform as a useful scale in research and clinical settings because of its shortness, multidimensionality and having a good factor and divergent analysis.