External validity of the benign and malicious envy scale with Japanese undergraduate student and non-student samples

Abstract

This study examined the validity of the Japanese version of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS) with Japanese undergraduate student and non-student samples. Previous studies have identified two types of envy, benign and malicious, that motivate different types of behavior. However, the validity of the BeMaS, developed to measure two types of dispositional envy, has not been adequately confirmed in East Asian countries. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the two-factor structure of BeMaS is identical across various samples. Thus, in this study, we specified the Japanese words describing envy, namely, urayamashii or netamashii, suitable for the Japanese BeMaS. Additionally, we tested the validity of the scale’s two-factor model across undergraduate students and non-student samples. The questionnaire survey results showed that the validity of BeMaS’s two-factor structural model was confirmed in both samples and the goodness of fit was better for urayamashii than for netamashii. Moreover, measurement invariance across the two samples was established in configural and metric models.