Factor structure of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) in subjects who had suffered from the 2004 Niigata-Chuetsu Earthquake in Japan: a community-based study

Toyabe, Shin-ichi; Shioiri, Toshiki; Kobayashi, Kuriko; Kuwabara, Hideki; Koizumi, Masataka; Endo, Taro; Ito, Miki; Honma, Hiroko; Fukushima, Noboru; Someya, Toshiyuki; Akazawa, Kouhei

We previously reported that a model consisting of the two factors showed a high level of goodness-of-fit in a survey of subjects who had experienced the Niigata-Chuetsu Earthquake at five months after the earthquake [16] . The proposed two-factor model also showed a good fit to the results of the survey of subjects two years after the earthquake. There has been debate as to whether GHQ is a unidimensional or multi-dimensional measure [3] [4] [5] [6] . Our results regarding model fitting showed that the proposed two-factor model was superior to the one-factor model and models consisting of three or more factors (data not shown) [5, 7] . The two-factor structure in the present study was quite stable regardless of the differences in scoring methods and sampling time. In general, the factor structure of GHQ-12 has provided quite different results in