The General Mattering Scale, the Anti-Mattering Scale, and the Fear of Not Mattering Inventory: Psychometric Properties and Links with Distress and Hope Among Chinese University Students

Wei Liu; Jeffrey Hugh Gamble; Cui-Hong Cao; Xiao-Ling Liao; I-Hua Chen; Gordon L Flett

doi:10.2147/PRBM.S430455

The General Mattering Scale, the Anti-Mattering Scale, and the Fear of Not Mattering Inventory: Psychometric Properties and Links with Distress and Hope Among Chinese University Students

Psychol Res Behav Manag. 2023 Nov 1:16:4445-4459. doi: 10.2147/PRBM.S430455. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Wei Liu¹, Jeffrey Hugh Gamble², Cui-Hong Cao^{3

4}, Xiao-Ling Liao⁵, I-Hua Chen¹, Gordon L Flett⁶

Affiliations

¹ Chinese Academy of Education Big Data, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, People's Republic of China.
² Department of English, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan.
³ Faculty of Education, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, People's Republic of China.
⁴ School of Foreign Languages, Shandong Women's University, Jinan, People's Republic of China.
⁵ Faculty of Education, Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University, Nanchang, People's Republic of China.
⁶ Faculty of Health, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Abstract

Purpose: Mattering is essential to university students' mental health. Feeling valued by others or unimportant can affect their overall well-being. However, most measures for assessing mattering have been developed and tested in Western countries, with limited evaluation of the measures when administered to university students in other regions. This study evaluated the reliability and validity of three mattering-related instruments - the General Mattering Scale (GMS), Anti-Mattering Scale (AMS), and Fear of Not Mattering Inventory (FNMI) among Chinese university students using classical test theory and Rasch analysis.

Methods: The study comprised 3594 university students from 19 universities across 13 provinces in mainland China, with a balanced gender distribution of 47.2% females and 52.8% males. Participants' ages ranged from 18 to 37, averaging 20.02 years. Most (78.4%) were in four-year programs, with the rest in three-year programs. The majority were freshmen (54.2%), and 86.3% had siblings. The predominant major was engineering (43.4%), followed by roughly equal representations in science, social science, and literature/art.

Results: The three scales showed high reliability and factorial validity, with Rasch analysis confirming their unidimensionality and monotonicity, although 2 of 15 items (one GMS item and one FNMI item) had lower fit. There were no substantial differences in item functioning between male and female respondents. Further analyses indicated that mattering, anti-mattering, and fear of not mattering all explained significant unique variance in levels of hope and distress.

Conclusion: All three mattering-related instruments are suitable for assessing Chinese students' mattering, anti-mattering, and fear of not mattering and changes in levels of these mattering dimensions. Moreover, each measure represents a unique element of the mattering construct in terms of associations with levels of hope and distress assessed in during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: anti-mattering; distress; fear of not mattering; hope; mattering; university students.

Grants and funding

The study was funded by Shandong Province Social Science Foundation Project “Research on digitalization empowering modernization of rural education governance”, grant number: 23CJYJ19. Gordon Flett is supported by the Canada Research Chairs program and he currently holds a research chair in personality and health.