Cross-Cultural Evaluation of the Psychometric Properties of the Spiritual Well-Being Scale: A Systematic Review

Since spiritual well-being has a significant role in individual and social health, using a valid scale to identify these properties is essential. Comparing factor structure and differences in the number of dimensions and items of subscales could be an indicator of differences in individuals' attitudes toward spirituality among diverse cultures. The present review was performed for psychometric evaluation of the spiritual well-being measures. A systematic review of international databases and Iranian databases was conducted to evaluate studies published between January 1, 1970, and October 1, 2022. QUADAS-2, STARD, and COSMIN scales were used for risk of bias assessment. Following two rounds of screening, 14 articles entered quality assessment. According to the results, studies examining the factor structure of the spiritual well-being scale (SWBS) instrument have been conducted for the years 1998 to 2022. The mean age of the participants in these studies ranged from 20.8 to 79.08 years. During the process of exploratory factor analysis, the researchers reported the presence of two to five latent factors, and the range of explained variance was between 35.6 and 71.4%. However, most of the reports indicated the existence of two or three latent factors. The findings of the present study provide an image of the psychometric status of the SWBS for researchers and clinicians in this field and can help them make optimum decisions in selecting a scale or conducting additional psychometric studies or adopting this scale for studies in new populations.