Personal helplessness of adolescents: design and testing of psychodiagnostics technique

The article describes the process of creation and testing of an original questionnaire to diagnose personal helplessness in adolescents. Traditionally researchers use a complex of four techniques to diagnose personal helplessness, on the one hand it is time-consuming for a researcher and respondents, on the other hand, the results of such diagnostic allowed ascertaining the presence of personal helplessness or self-dependence, but they did not give any representation about the individual characteristics of structural components of personal helplessness. The theoretical basis of the developed technique is the concept of personal helplessness (Tsiring, D.A.). The technique is based on the structure of personal helplessness, consisting of four components (motivational, cognitive, emotional and volitional). In accordance with that four scales were laid in the questionnaire. We have created the list of properties that reflect the psychological content of the personal helplessness phenomenon, and which is based on existing studies. The analysis of the internal consistency of method items demonstrated a high level of internal consistency of the whole technique (a-Cronbach = 0,918), and of each scale: the cognitive component; the motivational component; the emotional component; the volitional component. During the empirical testing, we conducted a factor analysis of method indicators, that confirmed the factor structure inherent in the questionnaire. The analysis identified 4 factors, consistent with the scales of the questionnaire, the proportion of explainable variance was 70,213 per cent. We tested the reliability of the technique by half-splitting and test-retest methods. The correlation coefficient of half-splitting indicates the high level of techniques reliability. The coefficient of correlation of primary and re-diagnostic results indicates the high test-retest reliability. We also tested the method on the concurrent validity. We obtained significant correlations of the results of our questionnaire and the results of techniques which are traditionally used to diagnose personal helplessness, such as "Attribution style questionnaire for teenagers OSTAP" by D.A. Tsiring; "Scale of depression" adapted by T.I. Balashova; "Personal scale manifestations of anxiety" adapted by T.A. Nemchinov, V.G. Norakidze. We conducted the procedure of standardization for the method. The results of the analysis let us state that the questionnaire for personal helplessness diagnostics satisfies the requirements and can be used as a tool to diagnose personal helplessness and self-dependence of adolescents.

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