1. Beliefs about mental illness in a Spanish-speaking Latin American sample.
- Author
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Hirai M, Dolma S, Vernon LL, and Clum GA
- Subjects
- Acculturation, Adolescent, Adult, Female, Humans, Latin America ethnology, Longitudinal Studies, Male, Mental Disorders diagnosis, Middle Aged, Psychometrics methods, Reproducibility of Results, Social Stigma, Young Adult, Hispanic or Latino psychology, Language, Mental Disorders ethnology, Mental Disorders psychology, Surveys and Questionnaires standards, Translating
- Abstract
The US Hispanic population is large and rapidly growing, with serious healthcare disparities. Alarmingly, 67% of Hispanic adults with a mental illness go untreated. Attempts to increase treatment rates have had limited success, likely partly due to stigma beliefs. There is an urgent need to develop and utilize a Spanish language stigma assessment tool. The current study is the first to do so, translating the Beliefs Toward Mental Illness (BTMI; Hirai et al., 2018) scale into Spanish (S-BTMI). Our psychometric findings with English-Spanish bilingual Latinx undergraduate students suggest that the S-BTMI can be a reliable measure of mental illness stigma. The BTMI's 4-factor solution was confirmed by the S-BTMI. Language invariance tests for the S-BTMI and BTMI demonstrated metric invariance and partial scalar invariance. The S-BTMI's factors produced strong internal consistency and two-week test-retest reliability. A previous Latinx sample's BTMI scores were similar to the current S-BTMI scores, except for greater endorsement of incurability beliefs for the Spanish version. Average stigma levels were fairly low in the current sample. Use of the BTMI-S can improve our understanding of stigma, and its relationships to language, culture, acculturation, and treatment-seeking in Latinx communities., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier B.V.)
- Published
- 2021
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