Scale Establishment Of Angry Constitution And Its Reliability And Validity Tests

Objectives: In the current clinical settings, the diseases caused by anger were more common compared to other emotion-related syndromes. The aim of this study was to construct an angry constitution scale according to the standard scale establishment procedure. The scale could be used as a tool to study the constitution characteristics and mechanisms in various emotional diseases triggered by anger and thus it might contribute to the prevention of anger-related emotional diseases.Methods: Firstly, defined the concept of angry constitution based on the Basic Theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine, specifically on its Constitution Theory and Zangxiang Theory. Secondly, all the possible candidates of the item pool were first listed by reviewing the literatures of angry related diseases and the retrospect studies of hospital records from three hospitals, and then the primary version of the scale was finalized by consulting the peers in this field, and by analyzing the item pool with frequency distribution and P60 standard. Thirdly, 520 people were sampled in the multistage stratified cluster sampling method and were tested by the primary scale of angry constitution, who lived in Jinan district with career variation of student, farmer and factory worker, aging from 18 to 55 years old. After further analysis of the survey data from valid 501 cases with four different statistic methods: tendency of dispersion method, distinction of analysis, exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach'sαcoefficient method, the item pool was filtered and the scale dimension was set up, and the prior test version of this scale was established. Fourthly, the feasibility, reliability and validity of the scale were tested. All statistic analysis was finished by SPSS13.0 if necessary.Results: 1. Definition of angry constitution was established. The process of formation of angry constitution was demonstrated as :potentially disorder of Qi and blood→angry→disturbance of movement of Qi→the live loss of control of the maintenance of normal flow of Qi→functional decline of viscera and organs→movement and metabolism disorder of essencial substances,blood and body fluid→angry constitution. 2. There were total 4 602 literatures related to angry, 1 017 of which were related to this studies; 54 703 hospital records were reviewed, of which 506 were emotional related disease and 130 cases were angry induced diseases. From the literature and hospital record study, 86 high frequency encountered items were pooled out and 56 items were kept after peer consultation and small range test. 3. After epidemic research and statistic analysis, the scale of angry constitution was established with 37 items distributed in four dimensions of morphological characteristics, angry impairing liver, decreased function of the body and psychological characteristics. 4. The feasibility of this scale: 99.2% feed back, of which effective rate 96.3%; the tester could finish the scale in 10 to 15 min. The reliability of the scale: test-retest reliability 0.707~0.799; split-half reliability: 0.900; Cronbach'sα= 0.921. The validity of the scale: exploratory factor analysis revealed that the structure validity had logic relation with the cumulative variance of 56.068%. The common charges on each item were all larger than 4.0 (with min 0.432 and max 0.784, respectively). The interior correlation coefficient between the total scale score and its subdivision dimension score were 0.632~0.881, among each dimension was 0.401~0.962. The validity of the scale of angry constitution could effectively distinguish trait angry and none-trait angry population. Except the morphological characteristics dimension, all other dimension scores were statistically different (P<0.001), including two groups of angry impairing liver dimension, decreased function of the body dimension, psychological characteristics dimension and between the total score of the scale.Conclusions: The scale establishment of angry constitution is a sensitive, effective and reliable test tool which can cover all the aspects of angry constitution and thus be used to evaluate the angry constitution of the population. It can also be used clinically as tool to adjust patient's constitutional variation, thus it may have potential application in the prevention of emotion-related diseases.