Item-phrasing in Antonovskyʹs sense of coherence scale related to negative and positive affectivity

There is concern that, rather than being a measure of resiliency, the Sense of Coherence (SOC) scale inadvertently measures negative affectivity. A contributing factor could be its number of negatively phrased items. At the suggestion of its author, the 12 negatively phrased and 15 neutrally phrased items were treated as subscales. Three samples: nursing students, managerial and administrative personnel and life insurance consultants, completed the SOC scale and various negative and positive affectivity scales. Correlational results do not support the likelihood that the negatively phrased items could, by their negative phrasing, lead to the scaleʹs high correlations with measures of negative affectivity. The patterns of correlation of the two subscales with the full scale and with the trait scales were all so similar that they probably do not contribute differently to the total score. Stepwise multiple regression analyses showed that between 39–50% of variance in the two subscales could not be explained in terms of variance in common with the negative and positive affectivity measures used, even after allowing for error variance.