Psychometric properties of family sense of coherence scale among German university students and measurement invariance across genders

Family sense of coherence consists of a mechanism shared by members of a family to deal with stressors. It is related to the perceived comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness of an individual's family life. The study aimed to adapt Family Sense of Coherence Scale to German culture and examine its psychometric properties in a sample of German university students. After a translation-back translation procedure of adaptation, the scale was examined in terms of internal consistency, composite reliability, construct validity, convergent validity, and gender invariance with data from 476 university students. Findings revealed that the scale showed high reliability with the present data. Besides, satisfactory fit to the original unidimensional model was obtained as well as invariance of the scores across male and female students. Finally, the scale correlated significantly with all criterion scales in the expected directions. As a result, the German form of Family Sense of Coherence Scale was concluded to be valid and reliable in the present sample of German university students.