Nurse Psychological Capital Scale

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Abstract

The Nurse Psychological Capital Scale (NPCS) is a specialized psychometric instrument designed to measure the positive psychological resources of Nursing professionals operating within a Chinese cultural context. While Psychological Capital (PsyCap) is traditionally conceptualized through a Western, individualistic lens—focusing on self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism—this scale integrates collectivist values and the unique occupational demands of healthcare. Developed to address the limitations of universally applied tools like the PCQ-24, the NPCS captures nuances such as interpersonal harmony, humanistic care, and collective dedication that are deeply rooted in Confucian and Taoist philosophies.

By providing a culturally and professionally tailored measurement model, this instrument offers researchers and healthcare administrators a more ecologically valid method for assessing nurse well-being. It moves beyond generic employee assessments by recognizing that a nurse's psychological resilience is heavily dependent on their ability to navigate complex social dynamics and continuous professional development. The NPCS serves as a critical tool for predicting occupational engagement, understanding burnout, and designing targeted interventions to support medical staff in high-stress environments.

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Keywords
Psychological Capital
Nursing
Cross-cultural Psychometrics
occupational health
Chinese culture
scale development

📊 Psychometric Scorecard

Items Count
43
Structure
Multidimensional
Cronbach's α
0.98
Fit Index (CFI)
0.871
Validation Country
📍 China

Authors

👤 Xiangyu Lu

👤 Lina Wang

👤 Guifang Xu

👤 Haixia Teng

👤 Jing Li

👤 Yufang Guo
✉ [email protected]

Purpose

Standardized measures of Psychological Capital often fail to account for the profound impact of cultural background and specific professional environments. In Western frameworks, psychological resources are typically viewed as autonomous, individual traits. However, in collectivist societies like China, an individual's Psychological Capital is heavily intertwined with group harmony, interpersonal relationships, and moral duty. Furthermore, the Nursing profession requires a unique blend of clinical rigor and profound empathetic communication.

The purpose of the NPCS is to bridge this psychometric gap by providing an assessment tool that explicitly incorporates these cultural and occupational realities. For clinical supervisors and organizational researchers, this scale is vital for accurately evaluating the psychological resilience of Nurses, understanding how cultural values shape their coping mechanisms, and ultimately fostering a supportive work environment that aligns with local cultural paradigms.

Construct

The theoretical framework of the NPCS expands upon traditional models of Psychological Capital by restructuring it into three distinct, culturally relevant dimensions. The first dimension, work task-oriented Psychological Capital, reflects a nurse's confidence, resilience, and proactive approach to managing clinical duties and overcoming professional adversity. The second dimension, interpersonal relationship-oriented Psychological Capital, captures the ability to navigate complex social dynamics, maintain harmony with colleagues and patients, and embody the humanistic care central to both Nursing and traditional Chinese philosophy.

The final dimension, learning development-oriented Psychological Capital, emphasizes continuous professional growth and adaptability. Together, these dimensions illustrate that a Chinese nurse's Psychological Capital is not merely an internal state of optimism, but a dynamic interplay of task proficiency, social cohesion, and ongoing self-improvement. This tripartite model provides a more holistic view of occupational resilience than the traditional four-factor Western model.

Validity

The validation process for the NPCS demonstrated robust psychometric properties across multiple evaluative criteria. Initial content validity was established through expert consensus, yielding excellent item-level and scale-level content validity indices (I-CVI ranging from 0.83 to 1.00, and S-CVI/Ave of 0.988), ensuring the items accurately reflected the intended cultural and professional constructs. Construct validity was supported by both convergent and discriminant analyses. The composite reliability (CR) for all subscales exceeded 0.95, and the average variance extracted (AVE) values indicated strong convergent validity, particularly for the interpersonal (0.712) and learning dimensions (0.758).

Although the work task-oriented dimension showed a slightly lower AVE (0.471), the overall structural integrity remained sound. Additionally, criterion-related validity was confirmed through a significant positive correlation (r = 0.579) between the total NPCS score and an established measure of work engagement, demonstrating the scale's practical utility in predicting positive occupational outcomes.

Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations

Reference Instrument Correlation Coefficient (r)
Work Engagement Scale r=0.579

Reliability

Internal consistency for the NPCS was exceptionally high, with an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.975. This value indicates an outstanding degree of reliability, meaning that the items across the scale consistently measure the underlying construct of Psychological Capital without significant error variance. The subscales also demonstrated strong internal consistency, ensuring that each distinct dimension reliably captures its specific facet of the construct.

While such a high alpha value suggests excellent cohesion among the items, psychometricians might also note that it could imply a degree of item redundancy, which is common in newly developed scales with a large number of items. Nonetheless, these results confirm that the NPCS is a highly stable and dependable instrument for assessing psychological resources in Nursing populations.

Factor Analysis

The structural architecture of the NPCS was rigorously evaluated using both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). The EFA revealed a clear three-factor solution that accounted for a substantial 68.71% of the total variance, with individual item loadings demonstrating strong associations with their respective factors (ranging from 0.460 to 1.029). This provided empirical support for moving away from the traditional four-factor model of Psychological Capital.

Subsequent CFA was employed to test the fit of this three-dimensional model against the empirical data. The results indicated an adequate model fit, with a root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) of 0.078, which falls within the acceptable threshold for model adequacy. While some incremental fit indices, such as the Comparative Fit Index (CFI = 0.871) and the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI = 0.863), were slightly below the traditional 0.90 benchmark, the overall combination of indices (including a favorable chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio of 2.839 and an RMR of 0.041) supports the structural validity of the three-factor model in this specific cultural and professional context.

Subscales

Subscale Items Description
Work task-oriented Psychological Capital Measures a nurse's confidence, resilience, and proactive approach to managing clinical duties and overcoming professional adversity.
Interpersonal relationship-oriented Psychological Capital Measures the ability to navigate social dynamics, maintain harmony with colleagues and patients, and embody humanistic care.
Learning development-oriented Psychological Capital Measures the emphasis on continuous professional growth, skill acquisition, and adaptability in the workplace.

Instrument

Test Type Self-report questionnaire
Format 43 items
Language Chinese
Population Healthcare professionals, Nurses
Age Group Adults
Administration Self-administered
Completion Time 10-15 minutes

Nurse Psychological Capital Scale Items

📋 Items are currently not available

The individual items of this scale are not publicly available. Researchers interested in using this instrument should contact the original authors directly to request the scale materials.

Sample

The study recruited 619 registered Nurses from two tertiary hospitals in Hebei Province, China, using convenience sampling. The sample was predominantly female (93.2%), with an average age of 32.75 years (SD = 6.35) and an average clinical service length of 10.16 years. The majority (91.1%) held a bachelor's degree. The sample was randomly split into two subsets for exploratory factor analysis (n=319) and confirmatory factor analysis (n=300).

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Cite This Paper

Xiangyu Lu, Lina Wang, Guifang Xu, Haixia Teng, Jing Li, Yufang Guo (2023). Nurse Psychological Capital Scale. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-022-01148-x

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Cite this article

Mohammed looti (2026). Nurse Psychological Capital Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/nurse-psychological-capital-scale/

Mohammed looti. "Nurse Psychological Capital Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 14 Aug. 2026, https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/nurse-psychological-capital-scale/.

Mohammed looti. "Nurse Psychological Capital Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 2026. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/nurse-psychological-capital-scale/.

Mohammed looti (2026) 'Nurse Psychological Capital Scale', PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Available at: https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/nurse-psychological-capital-scale/.

[1] Mohammed looti, "Nurse Psychological Capital Scale," PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, vol. X, no. Y, ص Z-Z, August, 2026.

Mohammed looti. Nurse Psychological Capital Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. 2026;vol(issue):pages.

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