Development and initial validation of the psychological capital scale for nurses in Chinese local context

Psychological capital is affected by different cultures and professional characteristics and its constituent dimensions and evaluation tools are heterogeneous. There is a lack of measurements for assessing nurses' psychological capital considering nursing professional characteristics and Chinese cultural impacts.

To develop a psychological capital scale that conforms to the Chinese cultural background and the characteristics of nursing profession, and evaluate the preliminary validation of the Nurses Psychological Capital Scale.

Nurses were conveniently recruited from two tertiary hospitals, Hebei, China. The research process included three steps: item development (Delphi survey and pilot survey), scale development (item analysis and exploratory factor analysis), scale validation (reliability and validity test).

Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the 43-item scale comprised three factors (work task-oriented psychological capital, interpersonal relationship-oriented psychological capital and learning development-oriented psychological capital). Exploratory factor analysis showed the factor loadings ranging from 0.460 to 1.029. Three factors explained 68.71% of the variance. Confirmatory factor analysis showed an adequate model fit (x²/df =2.839, RMR = 0.041, RMSEA = 0.078, IFI = 0.872, TLI = 0.863, CFI = 0.871, PNFI = 0.768). The Cronbach's α for the scale was 0.975. The item-level content validity index (I-CVI) was 0.83 ~ 1.00, scale-level average content validity index (S-CVI/Ave) was 0.988.

The Nurse Psychological Capital Scale had good reliability and validity, which is a reliable evaluation measure for assessing psychological capital among nurses.