[The validity, reliability and factor structure of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI)]

Abstract

Purpose: The Brief Symptom Inventory is an instrument used in psychopathological evaluations. The standardization study of the instrument was carried out previously in a sample of university students (mean age=21.02) by the authors (Sahin & Durak, 1994). The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether the psychometric characteristics obtained for that sample were also valid for adolescents.

Method: The sample consisted of a total of 559 adolescents (287 female and 272 male), randomly chosen from different socio-economic backgrounds, living in different neighbourhoods in Ankara. The other instruments used for validation were the Social Comparison Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory, the Trait Anxiety Scale, and the Life Satisfaction Scale.

Result: The factor analyses revealed five factors whose item distribution matched very closely that of the previous study on university students. The alpha coefficients of the factor subscale ranged between .70 (for depression) and .88 (for somatization). The correlation coefficients of the factor subscale with the other instruments ranged between -.45 (p<.001) and .71 (p<.001). The current study also contains the results of the analyses in terms of the demographic variables and the three index scores that can be obtained from the inventory.

Discussion: The findings concerning the factorial structure and concurrent validity of the BSI with the criterion measures show that the instrument can be used with adolescents as well. The factorial structure obtained with the current adolescent sample is very similar to the one obtained with the university sample (Sahin & Durak, 1994). The researchers think that the same factor subscale can be used with adolescent samples as well.