[Validation of the French version of the Raine schizotypal personality questionnaire in a population of Tunisian students].

Résumé

Schizotypal personality disorder is considered as a marquer of schizophrenia proneness. In opposition at other self report measures of schizotypal personality disorder, the "Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire" (SPQ) developed by Raine, assesses all nine features of this disorder. The aims of this study is to present the validation on the French version of the SPQ on Tunisian student sample. It consists on a transversal study directed from April to may 2000. The sample was compound of 198 healthy and voluntary students from the medical university of Monastir. The questionnaire has a high internal reliability (SPQ total: Cronbach's alpha = 0.91; SPQ nine subscales: Cronbach's alpha = 0.59 to 0.74). The ten percent high and low cutoffs for the top and the bottom ten percents of SPQ scores were respectively 42/74 and 10/74 for women, 42/74 and 7/74 for men and 42/74 et 9/74 for total sample. A principal component analysis revealed two main factors or dimensions of schizotypal personality disorder in our sample: positive dimension (made up of ideas of reference, magical thinking and unusual perceptual experiences) and a negative dimension (made up of no close friends, social anxiety and blunted affect). Our results were closely similar to these found by Raine and, other validation studies with SPQ. However some sociocultural aspects were found in our study.