Background:

Despite the role of mentalization in mental health outcomes and prevention, psychometrically-evaluated screening measures for mentalization remain sparse. One widely-used mentalization questionnaire is the Mentalization Questionnaire (MZQ; Hausberg et al., 2012), which we aimed to adapt and validate for use in Spanish.

Method:

We adapted the MZQ to European Spanish and evaluated its psychometric properties in both adolescent (n = 389, ages 12-19, M = 14.5) and adult community samples (n = 382, M = 48).

Results:

Confirmatory factor analysis resulted in a unidimensional structure including all items. This model had better goodness of fit than the original and other adaptations. Invariance analysis showed the same structure in adolescents compared by sex and age, and additionally in the adult versus adolescent samples. Evidence for convergent and discriminant validity was found. Internal consistency values in both adolescents and parents were fair and in the adolescent sample the MZQ scores remained moderately stable after re-test.

Conclusions:

The Spanish adaptation of the MZQ presents similar evidence of reliability and validity in the adolescent and adult samples. The results support this being a suitable version for evaluating mentalization in the general population.

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