The Scale of Psycho‒Immunological Structure: assessing factorial invariance in Poland and Slovakia

Abstract

The paper starts with an attempt to develop a hypothetical cognitive structure of mental resiliency, called psycho-immunological system, which plays both a reactive (coping with difficult health situations) and proactive (health protection) role in relation to the human somato-immunological system. In order to answer the question: is the psycho-immunological system invariant in two neighboring cultures, Slovakia and Poland, the authors propose the psychometric operationalization of theoretical constructs of the psycho-immunological system in the form of The Scale of Psycho-immunological Structure (SPS) in both countries. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that four factors of the scale are equivalent in both samples on the structural level.