Establishing Chinese middle-school students’ mental-health norms with the Symptom Check List-90-R

Despite the widespread application of the Symptom Check List-90-R (SCL-90-R) with Chinese middle-school students, there are currently no widely accepted national norms for mental health specifically for this group. In this study our aim was to establish mental-health norms for Chinese middle-school students using the Chinese version of the SCL-90-R. A large sample (N = 20,862) of Chinese middle-school students completed the SCL-90-R. Their mean scores for the 9 subscales of the SCL-90-R ranged from 1.45 to 1.85. The mean General Symptomatic Index score was 1.61 ± 0.57. There were significant differences between these norms and the norms reported in a Chinese study conducted in 1986. The scores we recorded in this study can be used as new mental-health norms for this age group because the data were acquired directly through a survey using a large sample representative of middle-school students in China.