The General Factor of Well-Being: Multinational Evidence Using Bifactor ESEM on the Mental Health Continuum–Short Form

Abstract

© 2017, The Author(s) 2017. The Mental Health Continuum–Short Form (MHC-SF) is a widely used scale aimed at assessing three components of well-being: emotional, social, and psychological. The factor structure of the MHC-SF has been under debate over the past 10 years. The main goal of the present study was to examine the dimensionality of the MHC-SF. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), bifactor CFA, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), and bifactor ESEM were used to evaluate competing models of the MHC-SF structure. The total sample consisted of 7,521 participants from four countries: The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Serbia. The results indicated that the three CFA factors were very highly related, and that a bifactor ESEM model provided the best fit to the data in all samples. Our findings provided support for the bifactor structure of well-being with a strong general factor explaining most of the variance in the items.