Developing and Evaluating the Comprehensive Hierarchical Eustress Review (CHER)

Psychometric research on eustress-the positive experience of a challenging situation-faces a variety of issues that include: What features of eustress are central to experiencing challenging situations positively? What psychometric structure best fits these features (unidimensional, multidimensional, bifactor)? How is eustress related to distress and wellbeing? Can individuals be clustered effectively into different eustress profiles? To address these issues, we developed a novel eustress instrument: the Comprehensive Hierarchical Eustress Review (CHER), motivated by a new model, the Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE). Analogous to the CHE model, the CHER instrument contains 3 subscales for CHE's 3 sources of eustress (goal-directed action, momentary experience, stable qualities) with 47 items that reflect the 47 features of eustress that CHE extracted from the literature. To evaluate CHER and explore its potential for understanding eustress, we assessed it in a well-powered adult UK sample (N = 260). Using confirmatory factor analyses, we found that eustress is best understood as both a unidimensional and a multidimensional construct (i.e., a bifactor model), with items from all three subscales contributing to its conceptual core. The best performing model exhibited desirable internal qualities (satisfactory reliability and item discrimination) and external qualities (eustress negatively related to distress and positively related to wellbeing). Using latent profile analysis, we identified four clusters of individuals with different eustress profiles, who differed further on sociodemographic characteristics and personality traits. Findings reported have theoretical, empirical, and interventional implications for future work on the generation of positive experiences in challenging situations.