Exploring Adolescents' Positive Mental Health and Its Measurement in Croatia

Abstract

Analysing mental health among adolescents with valid and reliable measures presents a vital undertaking in the present times. Therefore, this study is aimed at exploring mental health among adolescents using an adapted Croatian language version of the Mental Health Continuum–Short Form, MHC-SF (Keyes, 2018). MHC was applied to a sample of 518 Croatian adolescents. Factor and reliability analyses, as well as convergent and discriminant validity, were performed to test the psychometric properties of this scale. While adolescents reported moderate levels of mental health, a disparity emerged across domains, with social well-being significantly lower than emotional and psychological well being. This pattern reflects the heightened salience of peer affiliation during adolescence and signals the importance of supporting social integration in youth mental health frameworks. Validity analyses confirmed that the best fit was found for the original three-model and bifactorial model, with more advantages to the three-factor model. Satisfactory levels of convergent and discriminant validity and internal reliability were determined.