Psychometric property of Chinese version of the Fagerstrom Test of Nicotine Dependence

Objective The aim of this study is to estimate the psychometric psychometric of the Chinese version of the Fagerstrom Test of Nicotine Dependence(FTND) in Chinese people. Methods Collected information of outpatients who went to the outpatient service for advices and assistants of smoking cessation in Shanghai Zhongshan Hospital From November 2008 to July 2009. Then randomly select the sample of 60 participants and estimated the reliability and validity of FTND. Results The Cronbach's a coefficient was 0.658, cocurrent with reliability coefficients of foreign studies, but did not meet the satisfactory standard of 0.70. The six items of FTND could not cover main elements of diagnostic criteria of substance dependence and nicotine with drawal in DSM-Ⅳ, lacked content validity. There were two components with eigenvalues>1,with accounted totally 58.767% of the total Variance in this scale,which indicated that it is multi-factor influenced. Conclusions The Chinese version of FTND is a fairly reliable and valid scale, but still needs to be revised to accommodate coss-cuhural differences to play a more important role in smoking cessation therapies and scientific studies in China. Key words: Fagerstrom Test of Nicotine Dependence; Chinese version; Reliability; Validity