Psychometric Properties of the Malay Empowerment Scale among Patients Attending Community Mental Health Centres

Background: One of the substantial elements for mental health and social services now is to bring patients with mental illness back to the community. Among the most established methods identified to achieve this target is via empowerment in the psychiatry rehabilitation service settings. Since there is no validated questionnaire available for the local population, there is a need to validate the Empowerment Scale (ES) so that research can be conducted to explore empowerment among patients with mental illness in Malaysia. Objectives: The study aims to validate the Malay Empowerment Scale (ESM). Method: A cross-sectional study, involving 240 patients with mental illness, was conducted at MENTARI community mental health centres in East Coast Malaysia. The ES was initially translated into Malay using forward and back-translation procedures by a group of experts. Data were analysed for construct validity by performing confirmatory factor analysis. Reliability analysis was also done to measure internal consistency. Results: In this study, the final model of ES-M consisted of 4 factors with 23 items, compared to the original version that has 5 factors with 25 items. The finding revealed satisfactory fit indices (RMSEA=0.045, SRMR=0.049, CFI=0.923, TLI=0.913) and overall Cronbach alpha (α=0.90). Conclusion: The study revealed, a 4-factor model with 23 items of the ES-M has satisfactory psychometric properties. The overall scale is valid and reliable to measure construct empowerment among patients with mental illness in Malaysia