Psychometric properties of the Flourishing Scale for South African first-year students

African Journal of Psychological Assessment

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Psychometric properties of the Flourishing Scale for South African first-year students
 
Creator Mostert, Karina de Beer, Leon T. de Beer, Ronalda
 
Subject Psychology flourishing; factorial validity; item bias; differential item functioning; measurement invariance; internal consistency; first-year students; university
Description This study focused on a positive construct of well-being, namely flourishing. In a multicultural and diverse country such as South Africa, it is a legal requirement to provide evidence that measures of psychological constructs, like flourishing, are fair, unbiased, and equivalent for diverse groups in the country. The aim was to test the psychometric properties of the Flourishing Scale, a purpose-made scale that measures positive functioning across various areas of life. This study tested the factorial validity, item bias, measurement invariance and reliability of the Flourishing Scale in a sample of 1088 South African first-year university students. A unidimensional structure was confirmed. Although three items showed statistically significant uniform and total bias for language and campus groups, the magnitude and practical impact were negligible. No evidence of bias across gender groups was found. Configural, metric and partial scalar invariance were established for language and campus groups. Full measurement invariance was established across gender groups. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.91, indicating high reliability. The study provided promising results for using the Flourishing Scale among South African university students to measure flourishing as an aspect of well-being.Contribution: This study contributes to the field of student well-being in South Africa. No studies could be found that test for item bias or measurement invariance of the Flourishing Scale, specifically for South African first-year students. This study is the first to test these psychometric properties of a Flourishing Scale in a multicultural setting for students from different languages.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor The material described in this article is based on work supported by 1) the office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning at the North-West University
Date 2023-03-24
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Survey; Quantitative
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/ajopa.v5i0.130
 
Source African Journal of Psychological Assessment; Vol 5 (2023); 10 pages 2617-2798 2707-1618
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://ajopa.org/index.php/ajopa/article/view/130/398 https://ajopa.org/index.php/ajopa/article/view/130/399 https://ajopa.org/index.php/ajopa/article/view/130/400 https://ajopa.org/index.php/ajopa/article/view/130/401
 
Coverage South Africa - North-West University First year 72.4% were between the ages of 17 to 20 years, and 16.7% were between 21 and 22; Afrikaans (260, 23.9%), Setswana (199, 18.3), Sesotho (152, 14.0) and English (94, 8.6%); 689 (63.3%) women participants and 319 (29.3%) men
Rights Copyright (c) 2023 Karina Mostert, Leon T. de Beer, Ronalda de Beer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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