A Brief Strengths Scale for individuals with mental health issues.

Abstract

Using their strengths and virtues enables individuals to build resilience and alleviate mental health issues. However, most existing instruments for measuring strengths are too lengthy to provide effective assessment for clinical screening. A brief instrument with good factorial and ecological validity is needed to measure strengths, especially among individuals with mental health issues. In this study, the authors developed a brief inventory, the Brief Strengths Scale-12 (BSS-12), to assess 3 strengths: Temperance Strength, Intellectual Strength, and Interpersonal Strength. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 was conducted in Hong Kong. Service recipients (n = 149) from a psychiatric rehabilitation organization were recruited to establish the factor structure and construct validity of the BSS-12. In Study 2, 203 university undergraduates from mainland China were recruited to examine the factorial invariance of the BSS-12 in a different culture and population. Each factor demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency, content validity, and discriminant validity. The BSS-12 may be a useful tool for assessing strengths in clinical and nonclinical settings for service planning and the evaluation of intervention effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record

Three-Dimensional Model of Strengths: Examination of Invariance Across Gender, Age, Education Levels, and Marriage Status

“…A reasonable assumption is that the difference may be caused by the variations in the demographic variables (e.g., gender, age, education, and marriage) between the student and community samples. In a previous study, the 12-item scale was validated through an undergraduate sample via CFA (Ho et al 2016), which comprised highly educated, unmarried, and young persons. The currently used sample is obviously more diverse and complex.…”

“…Education is a long-term and systematic project; only an extensive period of longitudinal study can provide direct evidence to verify whether education can change an individual's strengths and virtues. More recently, Duan (2016) suggested that mindfulness-based training may be helpful in cultivating these strengths. Although such empirical intervention research is non-existent, many schools have started to develop character education programs (Bernard and Walton 2011;White and Waters 2015), which can provide evidence for future studies.…”

“…To achieve measurement equivalence or measurement invariance, researchers usually test whether the items and factorial structure of a particular inventory are equivalent across different populations (e.g., male/female, young/older, and Western/Eastern); researchers also test whether the paths among the different latent variables of a particular causal model or the latent means of a specific construct are invariant across various samples (Byrne 2012). This paper presented the initial examination of the measurement equivalence of the newly developed 12-item BSS (Ho et al 2014b(Ho et al , 2016 in a community sample. The CFA results showed that the data from the community sample did not adequately fit the original 12-item.…”

“…Vandenberg and Lance (2000) propose that establishing the measurement equivalence or measurement invariance primarily is required to guarantee similar latent constructs across groups so that meaningful comparisons can be performed. It should be noted that, although different scholars adopted different labels to name their factors (Duan et al 2012;Ho et al 2016;McGrath 2015), the three dimensions of strengths are essentially the same. Temperance strength reflects "an intrapersonal strength that describes people who persist in achieving goals and exhibit self-control", which reflects the individual orientation of strengths that are consistent with conscientiousness (Duan et al 2012) and self-control (McGrath 2015); intellectual strength means "the curiosity and zest for creativity of an individual" that are reflected by vitality (Duan et al 2012) and inquisitiveness (McGrath 2015); and interpersonal strengths reflects "the love, concern, and gratitude of a person toward others", which is consistent with the relationship of Duan et al (2012) and caring of McGrath (2015).…”

“…A brief instrument with good psychometric characteristics is thus required to measure the three kinds of strengths for clinical populations (Duan et al 2012(Duan et al , 2013. Accordingly, they created a 12-item Brief Strengths Scale (BSS) (Ho et al 2016) for assessing temperance strength, intellectual strength, and interpersonal strengths. Although the brief inventory had satisfactory internal consistency, content validity, discriminant validity, and convergent validity among clinical samples, the stability of the factor structure was still unclear.…”