2021 Volume 43 Issue 3 Pages 262-273
The purpose of this study was to examine the validity and reliability of the Japanese version of the Mental Health Continuum Short Form Scale (MHC-SF-J) assessing positive mental health among older adults. Out of the 567 questionnaires distributed to community-dwelling elderly people, 547 respondents’ data without missing answers were analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis on the MHC-SF-J revealed that a second-order factor model by 3 first-order factors had acceptable fit to the data. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the total and its three subscales were sufficiently high (0.84 to 0.94) to confirm internal consistency. In accordance with previous studies, the percentage of “flourishing” older adults with a high level of well-being was 23.6%. In addition, the construct validity was supported by hypothesis testing determining whether the MHC-SF-J scores correlated with other scale scores/indicators in theoretically expected ways.
