The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire: A psychometric evaluation

Eplov, L.F., Petersen, J., Jørgensen, T., Johansen, C., Birket‐Smith, M., Lyngberg, A. C. & Mortensen, E. L. (2010). The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire: A psychometric evaluation. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 51, 548–554. The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire was originally a 22 item scale, later reduced to a 12 item scale. In population studies the 12 item scale has been a significant predictor of health and illness. The scale has not been psychometrically evaluated for more than 30 years, and the aim of the present study was both to evaluate the psychometric properties of the 22 and 12 item scales and of three new scales. The main study sample was a community sample comprising more than 6,000 men and women. In this sample the coefficients of homogeneity were all over 0.30 for the three new scales, but below 0.30 for the 12 and the 22 item scales. All five Mental Vulnerability scales had positively skewed score distributions which were associated significantly with both SCL‐90‐R symptom scores and NEO‐PI‐R personality scales (primarily Neuroticism and Extraversion). Coefficient alpha was highest for the 22 and 12 item scales, and the two scales also showed the highest long‐term stability. The three new scales reflect relatively independent dimensions of Psychosomatic Symptoms, Mental Symptoms, and Interpersonal Problems, but because of reliability problems it remains an open question whether they will prove useful as predictors of health and morbidity.     

Citation Networks of Communication Journals, 1977–1985 Cliques and Positions,Citations Made and Citations Received

This article analyzes the pattern of citations among all communication journals covered by the first nine years of the Journal Citation Reports volume of the Social Sciences Citation Index (Garfield, 1977–1985). It approaches these analyses from two perspectives: (1) bibliometric analysis of citation flows, ratios, and impact factors, and (2) network analysis of both cohesion-based and position-based citation patterns. The field of communication exhibits clear clustering and inbreeding, consisting of cliques of interpersonal journals, mass media journals, and residual isolate journals. Citation patterns within and across these cliques have been very stable from 1977 through 1985. The cohesion analyses show that Human Communication Research and Communication Education provide weak ties from mass media journals to interpersonal communication journals. The Journal of Communication is cited the most strongly by the most journals, and provides, by means of citations, bidirectional channels for the flow of scientific information between mass media journals and interpersonal journals. The positional analyses show that the set of journals that has similar citing patterns is somewhat different from the set of journals that is cited similarly. In particular, the set of sources for the research reported in articles in these journals is not similar to the set of journals that refer to the articles in these journals.