Adolescent Psychological Functioning Questionnaire: revision and psychometric properties

In the recent literature, devoted to the psychology of adolescence, a new tendency evolves to focus on the factors and indicators of the positive development, rather than only on the risk factors for problematic development. Nevertheless, the lack of measures which would not be based on the pathology perspective and at the same time assessing the broad spectrum of the adolescents’ everyday life functioning areas could be noted. The aim of the article is to present the revision process and psychometric properties of one of such methods – Adolescent Psychological Functioning Difficulties Questionnaire (after revision – Adolescent Psychological Functioning Questionaire). Methods and materials. The preliminary psychometric analysis (Pakrosnis, Čepukienė, 2009) leaded to the decision to replace the dichotomous scaling responses system, assessing the presence/absence of certain behaviors with the one based on the 5-point Likert scale, assessing the frequency of behaviors and allowing to use the questionnaire for measuring changes in the psychological functioning over time. This led to the need to correct formulation of some items and repeat the psychometric analysis of the revised questionnaire. For this purpose the data from 1049 adolescents (12-18 years) was collected. The factor analysis, internal consistency, test-retest analysis and comparisons between age, gender and family status groups were conducted. Results and conclusions. The new factor structure of 6 factors explains higher percent of total variance (48%) comparing to the previous one of 5 factors (29%) and allows evaluating not only psychological functioning difficulties (Non-adaptive behavior and Emotional difficulties scales), but indicators of good functioning as well (Socially adaptive behavior, Caring behavior, Adjustment at school, Self-confidence scales). Relying on such results and theoretical discussion provided in the article, the questionnaire was renamed eliminating the concept of “difficulties”. The psychometric analysis revealed that internal consistency and test-retest results of the scales improved comparing to those before the questionnaire revision. Besides, the questionnaire is sensitive to differences between groups. The conclusion can be made, that the revised questionnaire remains short (53 items), is valid, reliable and measures positive as well as negative aspects of adolescents’ psychological functioning