Self Concealment Scale: Validation of two Portuguese versions
Introduction Self Concealment Scale (SCS) is composed of ten items to measure self concealment, defined as a tendency to conceal from others personal information that one perceives as distressing or negative (Larson and Chastain, 1990) Objective To investigate the psychometric properties of the SCS 10 Portuguese version and of an adapted version containing two additional items specifically focused on self concealment related do health problems (physical and psychological) SCS 12. Methods The Portuguese version of the SCS 12 and other validated questionnaires designed to evaluate self reported health, perfectionism and optimism pessimism were administered to a convenience sample of 555 adults from the community (60.5% females; mean age 43.49 10.565) Results The SCS 10 and SCS 12 Cronbach's alphas were a 0.80. In both versions, all the items contribute to the internal consistency. The factor analysis, following the Kaiser and the Cattel's Scree Plot criteria, revealed that SCS 10 is unidimensional and that SCS 12 reliably and validly evaluates two dimensions: F1 Keeping secrets (Explained variance 48.60% a 0.816) F2 Personal concealment including health problems (9.65% a 0.797) The pattern of correlations of the SCS dimensional and total scores was as follow: negative low correlations with physical health 0.20) negative moderate correlations with psychological health .30) moderate correlations with self oriented perfectionism, social prescribed perfectionism, pessimism @0.25) and optimism 0.20) Conclusions The Portuguese versions of SCS have good reliability and validity (construct and convergent divergent) The factorial structure partially overlaps with the original. SCS could be useful for research proposes, namely in an ongoing project on the role of the mentioned personality traits on illness and health behavior. Disclosure of interest The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
European Psychiatry