Validating Psychometric Questionnaires Using Experience-Sampling Data: The Case of Nightmare Distress
Frontiers in Neuroscience December 5, 2018 Stefan Stieger, T. Kuhlmann
The Nightmare Distress Questionnaire (NDQ) is widely used to measure how much distress nightmares cause, but its validity remains debated. In an experience sampling study over 22 days with 92 participants reporting twice daily via smartphones, only two of the three proposed NDQ subscales—general nightmare distress and impact on sleep—showed both convergent and divergent validity. The third subscale, impact on daily reality perception, had unclear validity and was only indirectly linked to nightmare distress. Additionally, all NDQ items failed to distinguish between bad dreams and nightmares, suggesting the questionnaire may measure negative dreams in general rather than nightmares specifically.