Piloting mental health indicators for Europe

Abstract

Background: A two-year action project to establish the indicators for mental health monitoring in Europe started in 1999 under the sponsorship of the EC Health Monitoring Programme. Aims: This paper reports the results of a pilot survey conducted to test the feasibility of the set of survey indicators proposed. The test phase of the implementation of the set of mental health indicators involved five of the Active Partners (France, Germany, Greece, Finland, and Norway) of the Mental Health Indicators Project. Method: The sample consists of 2059 subjects, 923 men (44.8%) and 1136 (55.2%) women. The number of subjects interviewed in each country ranged between 378 (Norway) and 441 (France).Results: The coverage of collected data was good. However, telephone interviews did not appear to be the method-of-choice for conducting surveys regarding mental health indicators in the future. The prevalence figures of major depression and risk of having a problem with alcohol are in agreement with the major European studies. Conclusions: The set of indicators could be easily incorporated into general health surveys, as the interviews conducted were not time-consuming. The results supported the view that the citizens interviewed have found the survey easily acceptable. Declaration of interest: None.

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“…The most interesting finding of this study, however, was the evidence that the level of social support predicted the state of positive mental health in between-country comparisons. This supports the recommendation by the EU Mental Health Indicator project [15] to include measure of social support as an indicator for mental health.…”

“…EVI includes four questions, and is supposed to act as an indicator of mental well-being [13,11]. EVI is generally considered as a feasible instrument for evaluating the positive aspect of mental health [14,15]. …”

A Translation and Validation Study of the Life Orientation Test Revised in the Greek Speaking Population of Nurses among Three Hospitals in Athens and Ioannina

“…In the first instance, the evidence of the present study suggests that the LOT-R is suited for use in different cultural contexts. A comparison of the mean responses on the scale places the Greek (mean = 15.47) sample above Scheier et al (1994) US community sample (mean = 14.33), but the same with the telephone interviewed sample in Greece (mean = 15.35; Korkeila et al 2007) although in that research the life orientation had not been validated. It would be interesting for future studies to examine if these cultural differences are statistically significant and if they reflect differences in the levels of optimism of respondents in different cultures.…”

“…This is important for several reasons. First, recently LOT-R has been named as a measure for positive mental health under the European Community (EC) Health Monitoring Programme (Korkeila et al 2007). Second, the psychometric properties of the LOT-R have not been independently verified outside North America and North Europe which the present study was able to rectify and third this paper gives details of research procedure and represents a good example of how to contrast a quality of life measure.…”

Soziale Unterstützung als Ressource für Arbeitsfähigkeit

“…Soziale Unterstützung ist eine Ressource für den persönlichen Kräftehaushalt und somit eine mögliche Determinante subjektiver Arbeitsfähigkeit [2]. In der Literatur sind je nach Forschungsinteresse innerhalb der Disziplinen komplexe und heterogene Konzepte sozialer Unterstützung und entsprechend unterschiedliche Erhebungsmethoden zu finden [3].…”