Validating the Psychometric Properties of Mental Health Literacy Scale among Filipino College Students

Abstract

Mental health issues are predominant especially with our situation being at the midst of pandemic. Due to the marginal studies about mental health literacy, there are research gaps in terms of psychometric properties of available mental health literacy scales in the Philippines. The researchers aimed to close the gap through evaluating the psychometric properties of Mental Health Literacy Scale (MHLS) by Dr. Matt O’Conner (2019). About 820 Health and Science College students in Davao del Sur, Philippines were the participants. This validation study found out that four out of six subscales of MHLS are reliable (α= .852, .800, .867, .896) and .the remaining two subscales were having low consistency (α= .366 and .347). Despite of that, the overall Cronbach Alpha was 0.780 that makes the questionnaire considered to be reliable. Furthermore, confirmatory factor analysis found out that the six factors model that was introduced by the previous studies was invalid due to low factor loading items. Therefore, it was modified by deleting three items with factor loading lower than .40 to pass the model fit indices. Due to the limitations of the study, researchers had recommendations to further establish the MHLS in a Filipino setting.