Reliability and Validity of the Malay Version of Mental Health Inventory-18

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.