Mental Health Questionnaire (MHQ) for Managers: Development and Standardisation

Abstract

Nowadays mental health is being fundamental concern to human being, while work is an integral part of modern life. Mental health is an important psychological attribute that plays a determining role in increasing the performance of employees and reducing rate of absenteeism, tardiness, and turnover of employees in the organisations. Our aim was to explore the psychometric properties of the newly developed questionnaire related to mental health. The items were framed with help of the previously available tools and interaction with sampling unit. Initially, 56 items were constructed related to the emotional, psychological and social well-being, eliminating jargons and complex terms defining the dimensions and its underlying statements so that newly developed questionnaire could be used in variety of workplace settings and items were framed to fit the manager’s context. Only 42 items were retained on the basis of experts’ maximum agreement and this 42-item questionnaire was distributed to participants to take their responses. The sample comprises of 250 managers of first level working in different units of Coal India Limited. The results of reliability analysis indicate that Cronbach’s alpha = .896 after deleting the 15 items from the questionnaire due to poor corrected item total correlation, less loadings and cross loadings in exploratory factor analysis. The reliability statistics fit the optimal level of Nunnally’s criteria and statistically acceptable for newly developed questionnaire. Results of the exploratory factor analysis indicate that these 27 items are loaded on three factors and these three factors explain 42.623% of total variance in mental health. This questionnaire will be useful for assessment of mental health of managerial personnel.