A Spanish Psychological Screening Inventory: Norms and Validity for Costa Rican Adolescents

The purpose of this project was to develop a Spanish version of the Psychological Screening Inventory for use with Costa Rican adolescents and to assess its psychometric equivalence to the English version and its external validity. In Study 1, norms were generated on 600 male and 600 female high school students who were stratified on age and socioeconomic level and were geographically representative. Comparisons with the PSI English version were made for means, scale reliabilities, scale intercorrelations, and item endorsement frequencies. Study II compared the PSI Spanish version scores of students who did and did not request counseling. The Spanish version showed reasonable psychometric equivalence to the English version and was also shown to possess preliminary external validity. Its potential utility for use with U.S. Spanish-speaking populations is discussed.