Psychometrics of the Youth Internalizing Problems Screener with Turkish adolescents

This study presents initial evidence supporting the language adaptation of a brief measure of youths’ internalizing problems—the Youth Internalizing Problems Screener (YIPS)—for use with Turkish adolescents within the context of school mental health screening. Results showed that responses to the Turkish version of the YIPS were characterized by a psychometrically sound, single-factor measurement model, and that scores derived from this measure were moderately negatively associated with scores from several school-specific and domain-general well-being measures. Overall, results suggest that responses to the Turkish version of the YIPS may be useful in schools to identify youth with elevated levels of internalizing problems and concurrently poor quality-of-life outcomes, providing a warrant for school-based intervention. Yet further research is needed to probe the direct utility of this measure for classification and treatment purposes in schools.