Heterogeneity Among Moderate Mental Health Students on the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF)

Abstract

Measures of positive well-being are needed to support the shift away from a deficit-based approach to mental health. This study examined one measure, the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF), as a measure of positive well-being used in school-based mental health monitoring efforts. This study used latent profile analysis (LPA) to explore the mental health classifications of 10,880 California high school students’ responses to MHC-SF emotional, psychological, and social well-being items. Five latent mental wellness profiles emerged, including two ordered profiles (i.e., High Well-Being and Low Well-Being) and three profiles spanning the two ordered profiles. The High Well-Being profile had the most favorable psychological adjustment, and the three moderate well-being range profiles had differentiated functioning. Informing the utility of the MHC-SF, this study also compared the MHC-SF categorical diagnostic criteria with the LPA’s empirical classification approach and found the two classification approaches to be congruent. The findings provide an impetus for educators to attend to students in moderate well-being ranges and emphasize promoting positive mental well-being as an essential component of school-based mental health services.

Assessing Emotional Distress in Adolescents: Psychometrics of the Spanish Version of the Social Emotional Distress Scale-Secondary

“…As regards the convergent and discriminant validity of the SEDS-S, the results show that this scale correlates positively with the distress measure and negatively with well-being. This finding is consistent with previous studies reporting that the SEDS correlates significantly with instruments assessing anxious and depressive symptomatology and negatively with measures of emotional well-being, life satisfaction, socio-emotional skills, and HRQoL (Chan et al, 2022a , 2022b ; Dowdy et al, 2018 ; Furlong et al, 2020 , 2021 ; Maupin, 2021 ). These data are consistent with those of the SEDS-S-Brief, which provided validity evidence based on a relationship with measures of positive psychological states, such as well-being or life satisfaction (Dowdy et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Regarding test-retest reliability, our study showed Cronbach's and McDonald's ω values between 0.86 and 0.89, which are slightly lower than those found in previous studies, but those studies only reported for the total sample, without differentiating according to gender (Chan et al, 2022a(Chan et al, , 2022bDowdy et al, 2018;Furlong et al, 2020Furlong et al, , 2021Kim et al, 2019;Maupin, 2021). These data are consistent with those of the SEDS-S-Brief (Dowdy et al, 2022), which supported reliability, although based on temporal stability.…”

“…It has good psychometric properties with high reliability and good model fit for unidimensional structure (Dowdy et al, 2018). Furthermore, Furlong et al (2021) supported the unidimensional factor structure of the SEDS-S, and other studies have also reported good internal consistency indices, with Cronbach's alpha or omega between 0.91 and 0.95 (Chan et al, 2022a(Chan et al, , 2022bFurlong et al, 2020Furlong et al, , 2021Kim et al, 2019;Maupin, 2021). More recently, a study examined the psychometrics properties of the 5-item short version of SEDS (SEDS-S-Brief; Dowdy et al, 2022).…”

An investigation of the dual continua model of mental health in the context of eating disorder symptomatology using latent profile analysis

“…All participants in their sample had a DSM‐5 ED diagnosis and, on this basis, were categorized as ‘high ED’. Thus, mental well‐being responses alone informed mental health status, which may misclassify individuals since this method does not account for differences in ED symptom severity or ‘moderate’ mental well‐being (Chan et al, 2021). In contrast, we used LPA which examined how mental well‐being and ED symptomatology varied together to identify mental health status.…”