Abstract
The Scale of Body Connection (SBC) was created to address the need for a self-report measure to examine body awareness and bodily dissociation in mind-body research. Developed in the U.S.A., it has been translated into many languages and tested for validity of scale translation. The burgeoning of mind-body research and the widespread use of the SBC scale underscored the need for critical assessment of the instrument’s measurement properties. Thus, a broader evaluation of the SBC was designed using large samples from eight international, cross-sectional studies drawn from community (i.e., non-clinical) populations. Specifically, we assessed scale distribution properties and internal consistency reliabity, and using confirmatory factory analysis we evaluated scale contruct validity and compared male/female measurement models. The results indicated acceptable reliability for both the body awareness and bodily dissociation scales, and a good fit between the proposed theoretic model and the data, providing evidence of construct validity across all samples. Mean differences in body awareness were observed for males vs. females in most samples, with females generally showing higher body awareness compared to males. Multi-group structural equation modeling demonstrated a stable latent factor structure and factor loadings, indicating equivalent measurement models for males and females. In summary, this multi-sample study demonstrated SBC construct validity that supports its use in clinical research as a brief, readily translated, easy to administer measure of body awareness and bodily dissociation.
Highlights
There is considerable scientific interest in furthering the understanding of body awareness, the clinical benefits of intervention approaches that target the capacity for body or interoceptive awareness and practice, as well as understanding the neurological, behavioral, and physiological regulatory links to body awareness
We examined if the number of factors and the pattern of factor loadings for the Scale of Body Connection (SBC)-BA and SBC-BD latent variables were equivalent for the male vs. female two factor measurement model.The indices of how well the data fit with this version of the model were used to assess the subsequent comparison Steps 2–4
In Step 2, where the factor loadings for the two-factor SBC measurement model were assumed to be equal for males vs. females, we found no notable changes in model fit compared to findings in Step 1
Summary
There is considerable scientific interest in furthering the understanding of body awareness, the clinical benefits of intervention approaches that target the capacity for body or interoceptive awareness and practice, as well as understanding the neurological, behavioral, and physiological regulatory links to body awareness. Validation of the Scale of Body Connection
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