Russian Adaptation of Questionnaire of Mental Health Treatment Stigma among Adolescents: Preliminary Results

Abstract

Introduction

There is a lack of instruments evaluating self-stigma among adolescents with mental health issues in the Russian language for today. The questionnaire developed by Tally Moses (Moses, 2009) is convenient to fill that lack.

Objectives

The study aims to compare the main parameters of the original questionnaire to that of the version translated in Russian.

Methods

The original questionnaire was translated into Russian and administered to 40 adolescents (21 males, aged 12 to 17) with mental disorders except for severe cognitive deficits or pervasive developmental disorders. Means and Cronbach’s alpha for each of the four scales were assessed and compared to the author’s questionnaire values.

Results

Reliability analysis revealed similar Cronbach’s alpha for 3 of 4 scales (table 1) except the Secrecy scale (1 of 6 questions showed low consistency; its exclusion increased α from 0.63 to 0.74).

Scales	Cronbach’s α		M (SD)
	Original version	Translated version	Original version	Translated version	t-test
Societal Devaluation	.76	.76	2.3 (0.40)	2.3 (0.42)	.501
Personal Rejection	.78	.70	0.48 (0.39)	0.33 (0.29)	.002
Self-Stigma	.81	.76	2.0 (0.74)	2.2 (0.68)	.122
Secrecy scale	.84	.63	2.5 (0.50)	2.5 (0.55)	.594

The means for each scale were compared with original data using a one-sample t-test. Only the Personal Rejection scale was significantly low on average than the original data.

Conclusions

Preliminary results showed that Russian adolescent patients perceived the translated questionnaire much the same way as American ones. Thus, our findings provide optimistical perspectives of further adaptation of the questionnaire.

Disclosure

No significant relationships.