Validating the Unmind Index as a measure of mental health and wellbeing among adults in USA, Australia, and New Zealand

Eoin Travers; Bao Sheng Loe; Luning Sun; Heather Bolton

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0287215

Validating the Unmind Index as a measure of mental health and wellbeing among adults in USA, Australia, and New Zealand

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 2;18(11):e0287215. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287215. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Eoin Travers¹, Bao Sheng Loe², Luning Sun², Heather Bolton¹

Affiliations

¹ Unmind Ltd, London, United Kingdom.
² University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Background: The Unmind Index is a 26-item, 7-subscale measure of mental health and wellbeing designed for use on the Unmind digital workplace mental health platform. The Unmind Index was developed and validated in the UK but is used internationally. This paper reports further psychometric validation of this measure for use in USA, Australia, and New Zealand (ANZ).

Methods: Participants in four countries completed the Unmind Index and a battery of existing measures. In Study 1 (N = 770), we validated the Unmind Index separately in USA and in ANZ. In Study 2 (N = 600), we used multiple group confirmatory factor analysis to test the measurement invariance of the Unmind Index across the UK, USA, and ANZ.

Results: Study 1 establishes the factor structure, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and measurement invariance by age and gender of the Unmind Index separately for USA and for ANZ. Study 2 further demonstrates measurement invariance across locations, and establishes benchmark scores by location, age, and gender.

Conclusions: We conclude that the Unmind Index is valid and reliable as a measure of mental health and wellbeing in these locations.

Copyright: © 2023 Travers et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
Australia
Humans
Mental Health*
New Zealand
Psychometrics
Reproducibility of Results
Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

This research was funded by Unmind Ltd. The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors ET and HB, overheads costs, and payment for research participants, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The contribution of authors LS and BSL to this research was financially supported by a consultancy contract between Unmind Ltd and the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. There was no additional external funding received for this study.