Communicative difficulties of adolescents: study of psychometric qualities of the Questionnaire "Difficulties in communicating with peers and adults"

Abstract

Methodological approaches to the creation of a new tool for measuring communicative difficulties in adolescence are presented - the Questionnaire "Difficulties in communicating with peers and adults" (author A.G.Samokhvalova). The results of a study of the psychometric qualities of this questionnaire, designed to study the actual communicative difficulties of adolescents, are presented on a sample of 336 people aged 15-17 years (9th grade students - 86 boys and 79 girls, 11th grade students - 86 boys and 85 girls). The questionnaire measures what communicative difficulties arise in adolescents in the process of communicating with peers and adults. The technique allows to identify the difficulties of four groups - the basic ones, connected with the personal qualities of a teenager; meaningful, connected with a lack of communicative knowledge, inability to plan and reorganize communication programs; instrumental, connected with the teenager's inability to effectively implement the planned communication plans in practice, to influence the partner; reflexive, connected with inability to analyze communication, inability to recognize and correct own mistakes. All the final data meet the criteria of sexual and age differences, are correlated with the expert evaluation of the nature of communication of adolescents by specialists. The authors obtained empirical norms separately for four subscales. The results show good constructive validity of the method, including its theoretically justified factor structure in relation to different age categories, as well as statistically verified convergent and discriminant validity. It is concluded that the technique of "Difficulties in communicating with peers and adults" is reliable for measuring the communicative difficulties of adolescents.