Establishment and evaluation of Chinese University Students Sub-Health Scale

ObjectiveTo establish a Chinese University Students Sub-Health Scale and to evaluate of its reliability and validity.MethodsThe university students'sub-health was defined first based on the Chinese Sub-Health Scale-2 and supplemented by literature analysis,interview and questionnaire survey.And then there were 1 389 students of Yangzhou University taking part in the test to validate the rationality of the scale with item analysis,exploratory factor analysis,and principal component analysis.ResultsAfter a pilot testing,a 54-item scale was constructed.The scale includes physical,sychological,and social adaptation domains.The physical domain includes 8 dimensions and 33 terms such as physical disorder,immune disorder,pain,constipation,fatigue,gastrointestinal disorder,metabolic disorder,and sleep quality.Psychological domain is composed of 2 dimensions and 13 terms such as depression and anxiety.Social adaptation domain includes 2 dimensions and 13 terms such as satisfaction and stress.The cumulative variance contribution rates were 60.156%,52.241%,and 53.903% for the 3 domains.The confirmatory factor analysis found that the χ² values of goodness-of-fit-test of 3 sub-scale and total scale were from 38.21 to 760.93,with the df of from 19 to 467,χ²/df of from 1.707 to 2.823,Tucker-Lewis index of from 0.900 to 0.955,confirmatory fix index of from 0.910 to 0.966,root mean square error of approximation of from 0.047 to 0.075,and spectral root mean square from 0.42 to 0.55,respectively.The Cronbach coefficients were from 0.819 to 0.864 and the test-retest reliabilities were from 0.763 to 0.928.The reliability coefficients of 12 dimensions were from 0.697 to 0.843.The correlation coefficients of 3 sub-scale and total scale were 0.944,0.859,and 0.642(P<0.001).The results show that the University Students Sub-Health Scale has a good construction validity.ConclusionThe Univeristy Students Sub-Health Scale was established and the confirmatory analyses demonstrated that the scale was good in reliability and validity.