Construction of alienation scale in adolescent students and assessment of its theory

Dong YANG; Xiaorong WU

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:

Alienation is derived from dissimilation in philosophy.It is practically defined as the subjective state of individuals who develop negative feelings such as social isolation, uncontrollable and meaningless sense, oppression, and self-alienation because they are alien to others, the.society, nature and themselves, and even feel controlled.

OBJECTIVE:

To investigate alienation from psychological perspective,aiming to construct and verify the theoretical hypothesis of alienation,thereby working out alienation scale for adolescent students.

DESIGN:

Cross-sectional investigation.

SETTING:

National Key Research Center of Basic Psychology and National Key Liberal Arts of Southwest Normal University.

PARTICIPANTS:

The investigation was carried out from March to June 2000. The method of cohort stratified random sampling was adopted and the questionnaire was administered to adolescent students in Chongqing City and Lanzhou City. Inclusion criteria volunteer students of grade one in junior high school to grade four in colleges. Exclusion criteria Those who had incomplete data or had differences of more than 6 points in the total scores for three matched lie-testing questions in the questionnaire. A total of 1502 pieces of questionnaire were collected (including 1 066 questionnaires used for exploratory factor analysis and 436 questionnaires for verifying factor analysis); the age of the students covered the whole range of adolescence, and the boy-to-girl ratio in each grade was matched.

METHODS:

We combined literature analysis, investigation research and interview. The details are as follows First, theoretical hypothesis was put forward based on literature analysis; then related variances were collected through interviews and open questionnaires, which were compared with the items in scales used home and abroad at present so as to work out predicting questions for adolescence alienation questionnaire. Finally, 52 items were screened out and used to construct the preliminary questionnaire. The formal alienation scale was made after standardized designation of behavioral variances, and verified for alienation analysis in adolescent students.MAIN OUTCOME

MEASURES:

Behavioral apparent variances were collected based on interviews and open questionnaires, and used as psychological potential variances after statistical processing.

RESULTS:

Data of 1502 pieces of questionnaire were analyzed.① The correlation coefficient of each item in the scale was over 0.35. ② The correlation coefficient of each item with the dimension was over 0.30, with statistical significance(P ＜ 0.01). ③ The reliability coefficient of each item was over 0.39 with great significance(P ＜ 0.01). ④ Alienation was displayed in three dimensions social alienation, interpersonal alienation and surrounding alienation, which were associated with the correspondingdimensions of related scales (P ＜ 0.05-0.01). ⑤Alienation could be divided into 9 levels sense of meaninglessness, sense of self alienation, isolation, nature alienation, parent alienation, environmental alienation, sense of uncontrollability and social alienation. Parameters that accorded with the theoretical hypothesis and used for verifying analysis were proved rational.Based on the analysis of the 9 first-rank factors, second-rank structural model of 3 unrelated factors were obtained using main component analysis and the maximum variance cross rotation with the optimal coefficients of simulated parameters of X2/df=4.87;GFI=0.94;A GFI=0.90;RMR=0.0S;NFI=0.93;NNFI=0.92;CFI=0.95;IFI=0.95.

CONCLUSION:

Alienation scale has been proved to be reliable and valid. It can be used to assess alienation in adolescent students and has potential value of application in healthy psychological development and psychological education.