Measuring psychological flexibility to promote wellbeing: validation of the Spanish Psy-Flex in a healthy sample

In a context in which psychological flexibility has been revealed to be a pivotal process in psychological well-being, the Psy-Flex scale has emerged as a theoretically based, context-sensitive, brief scale that can be used in different settings and has good psychometric properties.

This study aims at analyzing the psychometric properties of the Spanish translation of the Psy-Flex, based on the responses of a sample of 170 healthy individuals. Standard psychometric methods and network analysis were used to evaluate the behavior of the adapted scale.

The analyses on the six items of the Spanish Psy-Flex yielded a single-factor structure (χ² = 20.435, df = 8, p = 0.009; χ² /df = 2.554; GFI = 0.961; NFI = 0.952; TLI = 0.943; CFI = 0.970: SRMR = 0.046: RMSEA = 0.096, RMSEA 90% CI = 0.045, 0.148, PCLOSE = 0.065), good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.839; 95% CI = 0.812, 0.866), and high consistency across time points (ICC = 0.887; 95% CI = 0.852, 0.916). The scale scores were associated with a wide range of measures related to psychological flexibility and inflexibility, well-being and mental health. Network analysis further supported the idea that the Psy-Flex items form a coherent structure.

The Spanish version of the Psy-Flex is a psychometrically adequate scale for use in a population without mental health problems as a measure of psychological flexibility.