Beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health issues have been prominent discussions worldwide. People are more aware of their mental health status as well as their loved ones. Besides having sound psychometric properties, a good instrument to measure mental health status accurately should be language-friendly. Hence, the 18-item Mental Health Inventory (MHI-18) was back-to-back translated into Malay Language and its reliability and validity properties were investigated. A total of 569 Malaysian adults (73.8% females), Mage = 21.73, SDage = 2.59 participated in an online survey during the pandemic. From the analysis, two items with low factor loadings were deleted. The remaining 16 items successfully loaded on two factors, namely Psychological Distress (CR = 0.89) and Psychological Well-being (CR = 0.90). The results supported convergent and discriminant validity. Thus, the Malay Language version of MHI with 16 items is a reliable and valid mental health instrument for the Malayspoken adult population.
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