Possible Selves in Adolescence: Development and validation of a Scale for their Assessment

MOLINA, M.F.; SCHMIDT, V.; RAIMUNDI, M.J.

JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY

Taylor & Francis

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2017 vol. 7 p. 646 - 668

0022-3980

Possible selves (PSs) have a significant role in adolescents? development. For this reason, it is of great importance to have adequate measures to operationalize them. The aim of this work is to present the construction and validation of a scale to assess PSs in multiple domains. Participants were adolescents (n = 320) of both sexes (female = 51.30%) from high-schools in Buenos Aires City / Argentina (age, M = 14.89, SD = 1.51). The scale was developed based on literature?s review and a previews qualitative study. Expert judges? assessment revealed that it has good content validity. Scale?s structure was studied with exploratory factor analysis and a 5-factor structure with theoretical meaning was found. Spearman?s correlations between current and future self-perceptions show evidence of convergent validity. Mann-Whitney U test shows that the scale can discriminate between sex and age groups. The scale shows from adequate to very good internal consistency. This results show that the scale presents adequate psychometric properties to assess PSs in argentine adolescents. The advantages of this scale respect existing measures of PSs are discussed. Indexada en: Thomson Reuters, Scopus, PsycINFO, EBSCO, EMBASE, PubMed, ProQuest, entre otras.