Hindi Adaptation of the Mental Health Literacy Questionnaire (MHLq) for Young Adults

The present study has adapted the English version of the Mental Health Literacy questionnaire (MLHq ) developed by Dias, Campos, Almeida, and Palha (2018) by translating and adapting it into Hindi. This will be helpful as presently no test is available in this language to measure Mental Health Literacy (MHL) of young adults. The questionnaire was translated into Hindi with the help of five experts. All were proficient in both Hindi and English and one was a subject expert. The process of forward and backward translation, the most applied process for questionnaires, was used. The sample totalled 450 respondents who answered the questionnaire facilitated by the internet via Google forms using the non-probability sampling technique. The majority of participants were females (73% ) and were in the age group of 18 to 25 years. Twenty-one years was the mean age of the total sample. For adaptation purposes, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is the method used to understand the factor structure. This was also chosen for the present adaptation of MLHq into the Hindi version. Three indices were utilised to understand how well the adaptation fitted with the original. These were the comparative fit index (CFI), the goodness of fit index (GFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). It was observed that the results support only a few domains of the original model. The psychometric properties of the scale were also assessed using CFA. The differences in the findings of the Hindi adaptation from the original English version could be due to cultural factors. The research recommends a review of the questionnaire items to align with the Indian cultural inputs.