The development and validation of the Mental Wellness and Illness Scale (MWIS) and its relation to the Big-Five personality factors

ABSTRACT

Recent research supports the dual continuua model of mental health, i.e., the integration between the disease model or psychopathology and the psychological model or positive mental health. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate the Mental Wellness and Illness Scale (MWIS) and to explore its association with the Big-Five personality factors. A sample of 1418 Egyptian college students (618 men and 800 women) took part in this study. They responded, in Arabic to the MWIS. It consists of 20 brief items in two subscales (10 for mental health and 10 for mental illness). The scale has acceptable to good internal consistency, and criterion-related validity. Two high-loaded components were extracted and labelled “Mental health” and “Mental illness”. Their inter-correlation was significant but modest. Gender differences were significant: men obtained the higher mean score on mental health, whereas women had the higher mean score on mental illness. The Mental Health Subscale scores were significantly correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, openness conscientiousness (positively), and neuroticism (negatively) for both sexes. The Mental Illness Subscale score was significantly associated with neuroticism (positively) and extraversion (negatively) in both men and women. The MWIS has Arabic and English equivalent versions. Based on its good psychometric characteristics, the MWIS is recommended to assess the dual continuum model of mental health.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• mental illness
• personality
• Big-Five Scale

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor David Lester for his assistance in proofing the manuscript and for his revision of the English version of the present scale. Thanks also to Ms Dahlia Eldeeb, Editor and translator for her back translation of the scale. I also thank the participants for their good cooperation, and the research assistants for the collection of data and performing the computations: Aya A. Hasan, Yomna Kamal, Yosra Kamal, Ala’a Said, and Mohamed Anwar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.