The Sense of Coherence and Its Measurement 12 Monica Eriksson and Maurice

Antonovsky (1987) developed a questionnaire to measure the sense of coherence. The original form, the Orientation to Life Questionnaire, consists of 29 items, 11 items measuring comprehensibility, 10 items measuring manageability, and 8 items measuring meaningfulness. The response alternatives are a semantic scale of 1 point to 7 points, where 1 and 7 indicate extreme feelings about questions (and statements) about how one’s life is experienced (e.g., ‘when you talk to people, do you have the feeling that they do not understand you?’ is scored from 1 1⁄4 never have this feeling to 7 1⁄4 always have this feeling). The questionnaire is a summed index with a total score ranging from 29 to 203 points for the original scale of 29 questions (SOC-29). A shorter version of 13 questions (SOC-13) of the original form was developed by Antonovsky (1987), where the score ranges between 13 and 91 points. Antonovsky intended that the sense of coherence scales be scored with a single total score and not component scores (Fig. 12.1), since he theorized that it was the sense of coherence in its totality that influenced movement along the ease/dis-ease continuum. This issue is taken up again later in this chapter. Examples of items measuring the comprehensibility dimension are as follows (Antonovsky, 1987, p. 190ff.):