Psychometric evaluation of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) with Chinese University Students

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to assess the validity of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) and the SWEMWBS, the shortened version of the WEMWBS, and conduct a preliminary evaluation of the metric properties of these scales by using a sample of university students in mainland China. METHODS: Nine-hundred and three students from a Chinese university participated in the cross-sectional study. The internal consistency, convergent validity, factorial validity and construct validity of the scales were examined. RESULTS: The Chinese versions of the WEMWBS and SWEMWBS showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.930 and 0.884, respectively. The results of the exploratory factor analysis suggested that the 14-item WEMWBS and 7-item SWEMWBS were suitable for a single scale. The WEMWBS and SWEMWBS also showed significant moderate to strong correlations with the other major subjective hedonic and eudemonic scales. Both scales showed good model fit in the confirmatory factor analysis, after reorganising several types of error covariance between the items. However, some items in WEMWBS recorded low validity in the evaluation of internal consistency, convergent validity and factorial validity. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated that the SWEMWBS had high validity, internal consistency and psychometric properties when applied to the sample of Chinese students. Further studies should apply this promising scale to samples of other Chinese populations.