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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
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
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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.