Development of the Psychological Capital Scale for Male Nursing Students in Taiwan and Testing Its Measurement Invariance between Genders

The aims of this study were to develop a psychological capital (PsyCap) scale for male nursing students and to compare the scores with those of female nursing students. Few past studies have focused on male nursing students to understand their PsyCap relative to female nursing students. We recruited 384 male nursing students in Taiwan to construct the PsyCap Scale with 16 items and four factors based on the relevant literature: hope, optimism, resiliency, and self-efficacy. The scale showed good model fit in confirmatory factor analysis with factor loadings from 0.62 to 0.78. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from 0.75 to 0.83 for the four subscales and 0.91 for the total scale. We also conducted measurement invariance tests with data from 402 female nursing student volunteers in Taiwan. The invariance of factor loadings and intercepts of the established scale (i.e., with the same unit and origin between genders) indicated that the male nursing students had higher PsyCap in optimism and resiliency than the females. We developed a 16-item-scale to make administration rapid and convenient and applied advanced statistical methods for reliable and valid comparisons between sexes. The results may help the government to create education programmes or policies supporting male nursing students.