A tool for sexual minority mental health research: The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) as a depressive symptom severity measure for sexual minority women in Viet Nam

ABSTRACT

In a context with limited attention to mental health and prevalent sexual prejudice, valid measurements are a key first step to understanding the psychological suffering of sexual minority populations. We adapted the Patient Health Questionnaire as a depressive symptom severity measure for Vietnamese sexual minority women, ensuring its cultural relevance and suitability for Internet-based research. Psychometric evaluation found that the scale is mostly unidimensional and has good convergent validity, good external construct validity, and excellent reliability. The sample's high endorsement of scale items emphasizes the need to study minority stress and mental health in this population.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• lesbian: scale adaptation
• sexual minority women
• validation
• Viet Nam

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for iSEE/ICS Center staff's (especially Nguyễn Hải Yến's and Vũ Kiều Châu Loan's) and volunteers' contributions to survey development and implementation; the Internet forums' support in promoting the survey; the participation of and information shared by all survey respondents; translation support by Võ Thị Châu Giang and Nguyễn Thị Linh Vân; and editing support by QuynhTrang Phuong Nguyen. The authors thank the Reviewers and Associate Editor for feedback that helped them improve the manuscript.

Funding

Survey expenses were covered by the Institute for Studies of Society, Economy and Environment (iSEE) and Department of Health, Behavior and Society at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). TQN's work on this project was supported by the Sommer Scholarship Program (via a scholarship for her doctoral training) and NIH grant T-32DA007292 (via a postdoctoral research fellowship, PI C. Debra M. Furr-Holden).

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.