Psychometric properties of the Somatic Symptom Scale 8 (SSS-8) in a representative sample of German adolescents.

Abstract Objective The psychometric properties of the Somatic Symptom Scale 8 (SSS-8) have been investigated in different studies. However, there is no study examining its psychometric properties on representative data of adolescents. The study at hand will present results from a large representative sample of German adolescents (13 to 18 years). Methods The following analyses draw on cross-sectional data from German ninth-grade students collected in 2015. Altogether, 10,638 individuals were surveyed with a return rate of 68.5% as part of a periodic representative survey in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. Results For the SSS-8, coefficient omega for the full sample was ω = 0.90, a…