Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: May 4, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: May 3, 2023 - May 19, 2023
Date Accepted: Jun 11, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Evaluating the psychometric properties and clinical utility of HEARTSMAP-U: A digital psychosocial self-screening and resource navigation tool for the post-secondary student population
ABSTRACT
Background:
Existing screening tools for mental health issues among post-secondary students have several challenges, including a lack of standardization and co-development by students. HEARTSMAP-U was adapted to address these issues.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the suitability of HEARTSMAP-U as a self-screening tool for psychosocial issues among post-secondary students, by evaluating its validity evidence and clinical utility.
Methods:
A prospective cohort study was conducted with UBC-Vancouver students to evaluate HEARTSMAP-U’s predictive validity and convergent validity. Participating students completed baseline and 3-month follow-up assessments with HEARTSMAP-U and a clinician-administered interview.
Results:
In a diverse student sample (N=100), HEARTSMAP-U demonstrated high sensitivity (95-100%) in identifying any psychiatric concerns that were flagged by a research clinician, with lower specificity (21-25%). Strong convergent validity (r=0.54 to 0.68) was demonstrated when relevant domains and sections of HEARTSMAP-U were compared with other conceptually similar instruments.
Conclusions:
This preliminary evaluation suggests that HEARTSMAP-U may be suitable for screening usage in the post-secondary educational setting. However, larger scale evaluation is necessary to confirm and expand on these findings.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.