Construction and Determination of Psychometric Properties of Children's Alexithymia Scale

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Alexithymia is defined as difficulties in identifying and describing the feelings, externally oriented thinking and limited imaginative processes. Most of studies on alexithymia have been performed on adults and less research has been done to assess alexithymia in children. Therefore the purpose of this study was to construct, validate and identify the factor structure of a children's alexithymia scale. Method: This research was a descriptive-survey study. The study population included all the primary school students of Qorveh city in the academic year 2019-2020. A sample of 260 students was randomly selected from this population by cluster sampling. Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Rieffe et al., 2006) for establishing concurrent validation and Researcher-made Questionnaire of Children's Alexithymia were completed by the parents. Data were analyzed by SPSS 22 and LISREL 8.5 using correlation coefficient, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Also the content validity of this scale was confirmed by four experts in the field of psychology. Results: Factor analysis showed that the five factors of difficulty in identifying the feelings, difficulty in describing the feelings, difficulty in imagination, difficulty in distinguishing the feelings from the physiological changes, and objective thinking with the specific value greater than 1, explained 59.26% of item variance. Results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that model fit indices were good. Findings of this research showed that Cronbach's alpha for the whole scale was 0.70. The value of Cronbach's alpha for each of the factors of difficulty in identifying the feelings, difficulty in describing the feelings, difficulty in imagination, difficulty in distinguishing feelings from physiological changes, and objective thinking were 0.89, 0.81, 0.88, 0.60, and 0.71 respectively. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that the 26-item Children's Alexithymia Scale is a suitable tool for being used in fields of psychology, education and research and its use is suggested to all professionals and researches in the area of psychology.