Page No 298-304
Sakshi Mehla, and Hardeep Lal Joshi,
Kurukshetra University, Haryana, India
The objective of the present study was to construct and validate a scale on ‘Purpose in
Life’ for adolescents. The purpose of the exercise was to identify how adolescents at
this point in life seek to direct their lives so that scale items could be generated that
would be relevant and easily understood by the average adolescent. Exploration of
their present understanding of purpose in life would facilitate direction in the crucial
phase of adolescence. The initial phase involved 64 participants from middle and late
adolescence answering open-ended questions relevant to purpose in Life. 90 items
were primarily drafted as part of item writing. These items were then sent to 10 subject
matter experts in order to take feedback on the relevance, readability, and ambiguity of
the items constructed. Lawshe’s content validation ratings were used for the inclusion/
exclusion of items used for the first tryout. After the SME rating, items were narrowed
down to 39, therefore, the total items in the scale used for the first administration were
39 on a sample of 350 participants. The sample consisted of 140 females and 205
males. Age varied from 14 to 18 years, with 84 percent of the population in the age
group between 15 to 17 years of age. After the administration, the data was put
through exploratory factor analysis to explore the factor structure of the scale. Data
explained 60 percent of the variance and resulted in four-dimensional factor structure
namely, goal orientation, self-enhancement, relationship orientation and career
orientation. Further, items were again administered to a fresh sample of 350 participants.
CFA confirmed the four-factor structure of CFA. Data was further correlated with other
measures related to purpose in life