Individual, family, and community sense of coherence in predicting positive mental health among university students in Germany and Turkey: Measurement invariance and comparative analyses

Positive mental health is a comprehensive concept representing an individual's personal, emotional, and social well-being. Sense of coherence is an individual's perception of life and the world regarding how comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful they are. The main goal of the study was to examine the roles of individual, family, and community sense of coherence in predicting positive mental health among university students in Germany and Turkey. Other purposes of the study included adapting the Family Sense of Coherence Scale to the German culture, adapting the Community Sense of Coherence Scale to the Turkish and German cultures, examining the psychometric properties of the scales obtained, testing the measurement invariance of the scales obtained across Turkish and German samples, testing the measurement invariance of the Positive Mental Health Scale across Turkish and German samples, and testing the measurement invariance of the structural equation model of individual, family, and community sense of coherence predicting positive mental health across Turkish and German samples. To this end, data were collected from 532 university students from Turkey and 499 university students from Germany. The study attempted to answer whether the sense of coherence and positive mental health have similar patterns across German and Turkish samples. The findings of this study may provide important insights for both theoretical literature and practitioners. Improved knowledge of the concepts of positive mental health and sense of coherence may guide future studies and highlight concepts contributing to possible differences. Keywords: positive mental health, sense of coherence, cross-cultural, psychometrics, structural equation modeling