Factor analysis of Greene's Climacteric Scale for Indian women

Objective: Do a factor analysis of the Greene Climacteric Scale for a population of Indian perimenopausal women and establish normative values. Methods: Five hundred and eighteen women, in the age range 45-55 years were selected and asked to fill out the Greene Climacteric Scale. Results: The mean age of the women was 48.03 +/- 3.40 years. A factor analysis of the data using an oblique rotation yielded three distinct factors with loadings more than 0.4. The breakup of the psychological factor into an anxiety and a depression factor which has been hypothesized earlier could only be verified using varimax rotation. The last item, "Loss of sexual interest" is shown to be part of the vasomotor factor. The means of the scores on the three factors are: psychological: 8.28 +/- 5.87, somatic: 4.64 +/- 3.73 and vasomotor: 2.39 +/- 2.10. These are much lower than the values given by Greene, but are in consonance with values published in two earlier studies for different populations. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.