Validation of the Croatian Version of the Sense of Coherence 29-Item Scale in Croatian Nurses
Article Category: Original scientific article
Published Online: Jun 25, 2020
Page range: 155 - 163
Received: Dec 19, 2019
Accepted: May 26, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/sjph-2020-0020
Keywords
© 2020 Martina Smrekar et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Introduction
The aim of the study was to validate the Croatian version of the Sense of Coherence 29-item instrument (SOC-29) within a nursing population.
Methods
The cross-sectional study was conducted between December 2017 and June 2018 at the University Hospital Centre Sisters of Mercy (UHCSM) in Zagreb, Croatia. A total of 711 nurses participated in this study. Internal consistency reliability was evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α), while the structure of the questionnaire was verified by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (method of extraction: principal component analysis (PCA)) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).
Results
The instrument demonstrated high internal consistency (α=0.885). PCA analysis has identified five factors that together account for 48% of the variance. However, the observed factors could not be interpreted. In the CFA, none of the models fitted well, although the fit of the three-factor model (CMIN/DF=4.786, CFI=0.767, RMSEA=0.073) was slightly better in comparison with the one-factor model (CMIN/DF=6.072, CFI=0.685, RMSEA=0.084). As the three-factor model in PCA has been shown to be uninterpretable, and all three factors were mutually positive and significantly correlated (correlation coefficients: 0.365–0.521), this indicated a single factor in the background. All items also showed saturation with the first factor (accounting for 25.7% of the variance).
Conclusions
The Croatian version of the SOC-29 instrument successfully fulfilled the necessary psychometric criteria for being used on the population of Croatian nurses. The study proposes that potential users use the single-factor structure.