Development and initial validation of the psychological capital scale for nurses in Chinese local context

BACKGROUND: Psychological capital is affected by different cultures and professional characteristics and its constituent dimensions and evaluation tools are heterogeneous. There is a lack of measurements for assessing nurses’ psychological capital considering nursing professional characteristics and Chinese cultural impacts. AIMS: To develop a psychological capital scale that conforms to the Chinese cultural background and the characteristics of nursing profession, and evaluate the preliminary validation of the Nurses Psychological Capital Scale. METHODS: Nurses were conveniently recruited from two tertiary hospitals, Hebei, China. The research process included three steps: item development (Delphi survey and pilot survey), scale development (item analysis and exploratory factor analysis), scale validation (reliability and validity test). RESULTS: Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the 43-item scale comprised three factors (work task-oriented psychological capital, interpersonal relationship-oriented psychological capital and learning development-oriented psychological capital). Exploratory factor analysis showed the factor loadings ranging from 0.460 to 1.029. Three factors explained 68.71% of the variance. Confirmatory factor analysis showed an adequate model fit (x(2)/df =2.839, RMR = 0.041, RMSEA = 0.078, IFI = 0.872, TLI = 0.863, CFI = 0.871, PNFI = 0.768). The Cronbach’s α for the scale was 0.975. The item-level content validity index (I-CVI) was 0.83 ~ 1.00, scale-level average content validity index (S-CVI/Ave) was 0.988. CONCLUSION: The Nurse Psychological Capital Scale had good reliability and validity, which is a reliable evaluation measure for assessing psychological capital among nurses. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-022-01148-x.