College students' journey to wellness: A confirmatory factor analysis of the Journey to Wellness Scale

Abstract

The mental health of college students in the United States has been a longstanding national concern, which has only been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic. The Journey to Wellness Scale (JWS) is a newly developed instrument grounded in empirical research in prevention, positive psychology, resilience, and social‐emotional learning, designed to measure psychological wellbeing in adults, including college students, across 10 dimensions: Adaptability, Initiative, Conscientiousness, Connectedness, Social Competence, Empathy, Optimism, Emotional Self‐Regulation, Mindfulness, and Self‐Efficacy. The JWS, a 60‐item self‐report instrument, requires participants to rate their endorsement of the items on a Likert‐type scale. The current study explored the adequacy of the JWS in measuring psychological wellness by confirmatory factor analysis with a sample of 722 college students. Results indicated that the JWS reliably captured the 10 dimensions and effectively measured overall psychological wellness. These findings support the JWS as a valid tool for assessing psychological wellness in the college student population. Future research directions and implications of the study were discussed.