Content Validity of the GAD-7 Through Expert and Student Perspectives

As one of the most prevalent mental health concerns among university students, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) can significantly impact the academic and social life of students, as well as their overall well-being. Early identification and intervention can help minimize the negative impacts of the disorder, therefore highlighting the need for effective and valid screening tools within the clinical setting. This study aims to examine the content validity of the GAD-7 questionnaire, one of the most well known and widely used questionnaires for identifying and assessing Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), through the application of Formal Content Validity Analysis (FCVA), within the framework of Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA), which is a novel procedure that combines several techniques of assessment within various fields. The research aims to achieve this through comparing responses between psychology students of different levels of education and an expert in order to identify any differences in interpretation and to determine the extent to which the items accurately assess the intended symptoms, which were selected according to the DSM-5 criteria and relevant literature. For this purpose, a Boolean matrix in the form of a questionnaire was created. The final questionnaire consisted of 56 questions in total, with the 7 items from the GAD-7 and 8 selected symptoms of GAD. The participants were asked to indicate whether they believed the given item from the GAD-7 assessed the presented symptom accurately, for each of the 8 chosen attributes. The agreement between the responses of the students were calculated, and these responses were then compared with those of the expert’s. Lastly, the findings of the analysis are presented.