The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) is a popular measure of psychological distress. Despite its widespread use, an ongoing controversy pertains to its internal structure. Although the GHQ-12 was originally constructed to capture a unitary construct, empirical studies identified different factor structures. Therefore, this study examined the dimensionality of the GHQ-12 in two independent meta-analyses. The first meta-analysis used summary data published in 38 primary studies (total N = 76,473). Meta-analytic exploratory factor analyses identified two factors formed by negatively and positively worded items. The second meta-analysis included individual responses of 410,640 participants from 84 independent samples. Meta-analytic confirmatory factor analyses corroborated the two-dimensional structure of the GHQ-12. However, bifactor modelling showed that most of the variance was explained by a general factor. Therefore, subscale scores reflected rather limited unique variance. Overall, the two meta-analyses demonstrated that the GHQ-12 is essentially unidimensional. It is not recommended to use and interpret subscale scores because they primarily reflect general mental health rather than distinct constructs.

《一般健康状况调查表》（GHQ-12）是一种衡量心理困扰的流行方法。尽管已被广泛使用，但其内部结构仍存在争议。尽管GHQ-12最初是为捕获单一结构而构建的，但经验研究确定了不同的因子结构。因此，本研究在两个独立的荟萃分析中检查了GHQ-12的维数。首次荟萃分析使用了38项主要研究中发表的汇总数据（总N = 76,473）。荟萃分析探索性因素分析确定了由负词和正词组成的两个因素。第二项荟萃分析包括来自84个独立样本的410,640名参与者的个人回答。荟萃分析验证性因子分析证实了GHQ-12的二维结构。但是，双因素建模显示，大多数方差是由一般因素解释的。因此，子量表分数反映出相当有限的独特方差。总体而言，两次荟萃分析表明GHQ-12本质上是一维的。不建议使用和解释分量表分数，因为它们主要反映的是总体心理健康状况，而不是不同的结构。