The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE): psychometric properties and normative data in a large Chinese sample

Abstract

Background: The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) is a new instrument that assesses subjective feelings of well-being and ill-being and overcome several limitations of previous popular instruments. The current study examined the scale's psychometric properties with a large Chinese sample.

Principal findings: Data were collected form 21,322 full-time workers from the power industry. The psychometric properties were assessed in term of internal consistency reliability, factorial validity, convergent validity, and measurement invariance across gender, age, marital status, education level, and income level. The results demonstrate that the SPANE has high internal consistency reliability, a correlated two-factor structure (with the uniqueness of three general and specific items of positive and negative feelings allowed to correlate with each other), strict equivalence across gender, age and marital status, and strong equivalence across education and income. Furthermore, the SPANE converges well with two measures of life satisfaction.

Conclusion: The Chinese version of the SPANE behaves consistently with the original and can be used in future studies of emotional well-being. The scale norms are presented in terms of percentile rankings, and implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Figure 1. Graphical representation of the correlated two-factor model of the SPANE (model 2b); the factor loadings are standardized loadings.