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Assessing Agreement between the K10 and MHI-5 Measures of Psychological Wellbeing

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Abstract

Responses to the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) and the Mental Health Index-5 (MHI-5) mental health subscale of the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form (SF-36) survey cover broadly similar constructs. The aim of this paper is to use the equipercentile method to produce a concordance between K10 and MHI-5 across the whole score distribution. Comparisons were made using survey data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH) and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which used both the K10 and the MHI-5 measures at the same time for the same participants. Agreement was assessed with Bland-Altman plots. The differences between MHI-5 scores and transformed K10 scores were assessed with paired t-tests. For the ALSWH data there is good agreement between MHI-5 scores and scores equated from the K10. The mean of the differences is −0.15 with standard deviation 10.8. Using the ALSWH transformation on the HILDA data for different age groups and genders, the mean differences ranged from 0.43 to 3.38 with corresponding standard deviations of 11.1 to 9.9. The concordance table was very similar to one obtained by the more complicated item response theory method. The results suggest that longitudinal surveys of the same respondents that previously used MHI-5 could adopt the K10 (or vice versa) without loss of comparability.

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Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based was conducted as part of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health by the University of Queensland and the University of Newcastle. We are grateful to the Australian Government Department of Health for funding and to the women who provided the survey data.

This paper uses unit record data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, conducted by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Australian Government, DSS, or any of DSS’ contractors or partners. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26193/PTKLYP.

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  1. Centre for Longitudinal and Life Course Research, School of Public Health, University of Queensland, Herston, Australia

    Ingrid A. Aulike, Annette J. Dobson, Jacob Egwunye, David M. Fitzgerald & Gita D. Mishra

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  1. Ingrid A. Aulike
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  2. Annette J. Dobson
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  3. Jacob Egwunye
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  5. Gita D. Mishra
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Correspondence to Annette J. Dobson.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Aulike, I.A., Dobson, A.J., Egwunye, J. et al. Assessing Agreement between the K10 and MHI-5 Measures of Psychological Wellbeing. Applied Research Quality Life 16, 1753–1766 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-020-09843-0

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