Psychometric Properties of Brief Life Skills Scale for Adolescents
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Abstract
Introduction. Life skills help young people resolve problems assertively and manage their lives healthily to cope with everyday challenges and are a key resource for enhancing their psychosocial development.
Objective. To measure construct validity through the implementation of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and to prove the reliability and concurrent validity of a brief scale for assessing life skills in Mexican adolescents.
Method. The Brief Life Skills Scale for Adolescents (Spanish acronym EHV-A) measures planning for the future, assertiveness, expression of emotions, taking responsibility, decision-making, and resistance to peer pressure. Designed using psychometric tests previously validated for Mexican adolescents, it only includes the items with the best psychometric values. It was administered to 3,787 male and female students. The internal structure of the test was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis with oblique rotation and confirmatory factor analysis to corroborate the theoretical consistency of the model. Reliability was estimated using Cronbach’s alpha. Concurrent validity was measured with a brief version of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem (RSE) Scale.
Results. The exploratory factor analysis model yielded a six-factor structure (planning for the future, assertiveness, expression of emotions, resistance to peer pressure, decision making, and taking responsibility) that explained 76% of the variance, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging between .82 and .92 for each factor, and .96 for the whole scale. This structure was corroborated by confirmatory factor analysis. The model had adequate fit indices, and the concurrent validity test of the EHV-A was acceptable and theoretically consistent (with correlations between .66 and .72 with the RSE).
Discussion and conclusion. The results show satisfactory psychometric properties and the convergent validity of the EHV-A, indicating that it is a potentially useful tool for assessing life skills in adolescents.
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