Constructing and validating a compound instrument for psychosocial wellbeing

Back ground & Objective: In recent approaches regarding mental health, the social life of a person, i.e. how a person lives socially, is known as an inseparable component of mental health. While most of mental health assessment instruments just deal with individual aspects such as mood and anxiety and on the other hand, the instruments which have been constructed to assess social health frequently disregard the other aspects of mental health. Our object was to build a single instrument to assess these two important aspects of mental health(psychosocial health). Materials and Methods: It’s a cross -sectional, descriptive study on 382 students in universities of Tehran province. The participants were entered via stratified random sampling. A demographic checklist, Keyes Social Wellbeing scale (for social aspect of mental health), and SCL-25 (for individual aspect of mental health) were usedto collect data,. Then questions of both scales were placed on exploratory factor analysis and factor structure of this compound psycho-social wellbeing questionnaire was determined. Results: The results of exploratory factor analysis with Oblimin rotation showed that the psychosocial wellbeing construct has consisted of sixfactors that altogether explained 61% of its variance. Cronbach α coefficient of 0.938 also approved the reliability of the construct with 30 items. Conclusion: Psychosocial Wellbeing questionnaire with sixfactors and 30 items is a reliable and valid scale toassess both of individual and social aspects of mental health. Wellbeing, Exploratory factor