ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

›› 2008, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (02): 184-192.

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Development of the Adolescent Self-disclosure with Peers Questionnaire

Zou Hong;Jiang Suo   

  1. Institute of Developmental psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
  • Received:2007-02-09 Revised:1900-01-01 Published:2008-02-28 Online:2008-02-28
  • Contact: Zou Hong

Abstract: The concept of adolescent self-disclosure with peers is defined as a behavioral process in which adolescents reveal personal information aspects about themselves such as their opinions, feelings, personalities, and experiences as well as share their comments and ideas about other persons and things directly through face-to-face communication and other means. Peer self-disclosure benefits adolescents’ social adaptation as well as their development both physically and psychologically. However, compared with studies on adults, those on adolescents are relatively few. Besides, most recent questionnaires in these studies were not designed specifically for adolescents. Instead, the items were extracted from the questionnaires for adults. Moreover, some questionnaires had serious problems. Since some domestic researchers applied overseas questionnaires directly, the applicability of these questionnaires had been ignored. Therefore, we tried to develop a questionnaire on adolescent self-disclosure with peers that can reflect adolescent characteristics and focus on the given topics of adolescence.
   Seventy-three adolescents were asked to complete an unstructured questionnaire. Based on literature searches and adolescents’ opinions, a structured questionnaire was developed. Thereafter, 262 adolescents completed the initial questionnaire. Further, 655 adolescents from four grades completed the formal questionnaire on adolescent self-disclosure with peers. We also tested the reliabilities and validities of this questionnaire through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.
The exploratory factor analysis revealed that the topics of adolescent self-disclosure with peers contained seven dimensions. They were parent-child relationship, physical development, tastes and interests, friendship, academic performance, experiences in school, and attitudes and opinions. The final questionnaire included 36 items. The result of the confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the validity of the formal questionnaire was acceptable, with the factor loading of each item above 0.58, and the Cronbach’s α coefficients of the seven factors were 0.920, 0.887, 0.832, 0.879, 0.839, 0.827, 0.794, respectively.
The seven main dimensions of the topics of adolescent self-disclosure with peers were parent-child relationship, physical development, tastes and interests, friendship, academic performance, experiences in school, and attitudes and opinions. Validity and reliability analyses showed that the psychometric properties of the questionnaire on adolescent self-disclosure with peers are acceptable

Key words: adolescents, peers, self-disclosure, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis

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