Re-examining psychometric properties of the Turkish form of the Guilt Inventory in a non-clinical and depression sample

Object: In the most general sense, guilt is conceptualized as a strong, intense and negative emotion that quickly emerges when people do not live up according to internal values, judgements and social standards or violate them. The aim of the present study was to investigate the factor structure of Guilt Inventory that developed by Kugler and Jones with confirmatory and explanatory factor analyses and reevaluate the psychometric properties of the new Turkish form in depression and non-clinical samples. Methods: For this purpose, 448 university students, 107 healthy controls and 56 adults diagnosed with depression were asked to fill out the questionnaire set consisted of the Guilt Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory, Disgust Scale- Revised Form and The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State Anxiety Form.Results: According to the results, original form of Guilt Inventory did not work at the desired level in Turkish culture. Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyzes revealed that the new form with 35 items and 3 subscales works much more appropriately. The analyses of group comparison and correlations with other scales indicated that Turkish version of the Guilt Inventory had satisfactory convergent, divergent and criterion validity. Additively, internal consistency, item-total correlations and Guttman split-half reliability coefficients showed that the Turkish form of Guilt Inventory had good reliability values which were comparable to the original version of the scale. Discussion: In conclusion, results revealed that the Turkish version of Guilt Inventory is a reliable and valid measurement tool.