X. Psychological Resources: Psychological Capital-School Psychological Capital Scale

Background

Psychological capital (psycap) refers to the psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism or the “HERO within” (Luthans et al. 2004). Research on the role of psycap in the school setting has been relatively rare. Prior studies in the educational context have usually focused on the individual components of psycap but not on the overall psycap construct itself. To address this gap, the School Psychological Capital scale was developed for use in the school settings by adapting exiting psycap scales developed by Luthans et al. (2007) for organizational context.

Abstract

Psycap has received much attention in the industrial-organizational literature and is related to a wide range of adaptive job-related outcomes. However, most of these studies have been conducted on adult populations and the role of psycap in the school context has not been given enough attention. The current study aimed to develop a measure of psycap for the school context and examined how it was associated with academic-related (e.g., motivation, engagement, achievement) and well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, affect) outcomes among school-aged populations. Study 1 (N = 1159) demonstrated that the School Psychological Capital Questionnaire developed in this study had excellent psychometric properties. School psycap positively predicted optimal motivation and engagement. Study 2, a cross-sectional study conducted among high school students (N = 246), revealed that school psycap was associated with optimal academic and well-being outcomes.

Scales and Subscales

Psycap scale has four factors that are, hope; efficacy; resilience and optimism

Funding

This study was funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 41/12 ISC and OER 28/15 ISC) and administered by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Reference

Luthans, F., Luthans, K. W., & Luthans, B. C. (2004). Positive psychological capital: Human and social capital. Business Horizons, 47, 45–50.

Luthans, F., Avolio, B. J., Avey, J. B., & Norman, S. M. (2007). Positive psychological capital: Measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction. Personnel Psychology, 60(3), 541–572. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00083.x.

Citation

King, R. B., & Caleon, I. S. (2021). School psychological capital- Instrument development, validation, and prediction. Child Indicators Research, 14(1), 341-367.