Psychological Empowerment Of City Resident: Structure And Measurement

Psychological Empowerment (PE) is a core concept of wewstern community psychology, whereas its connotation remains controversial with dispute. The theoretical and empirical research on issues of Psychological Empowerment in the field of community psychology not only helps to bridge the gap between domestic and western countries, but also contributes to the construction of the harmonious community in our country.Based on Chinese national conditions and from personal comprehension of the concept and struerure of PE, the researcher of this studuy attempts to formulate a Psychological Empowerment scale taking city residents as subjects. This research also makes a probe into the current situation and possible influencial factors of Chinese city residents'PE.(1)Psychological Empowerment of city residents refers to the process in which community members'participation is targeted, and the participants'personality, self motivation and active regulation are evaluated. The concept contains three factors, namely, the criticism tendency based on transformation, self evaluation in participant ability and self regulation in participant motivation. The three factors are all logically related. The criticism tendency based on transformation serves the cognitive foundation of the citizen participation, which influences self-evaluation in participant ability and self regulation in participant motivation, and there are some interactions between self-evaluation in participant ability and self regulation in participant motivation.(2)The dimension of city residents' Psychological Empowerment is confirmed by qualitative analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factory analysis. According to the above dimension, There are 22 items in PEOCRS, inclduding 4 of "The criticism tendency based on transformation",5 of "self-evaluation in participant ability",7 of "self regulation in participant motivation", and this scale includes one lying subscale which consists of 6 items. The reliability and validity test prove that the main indexes of reliability and validity have met the psychometric requirements. The results show the overall internal consistency reliability is 0.809, while each subscale's internal consistency reliability is between 0.800 and 0.634. The overall half-split reliability is 0.746 and each subscale's half-split reliability is between 0.758 and 0.602. Two weeks later, the test is taken again and the retest reliability is 0.823;In addition, the convergent validation and discriminate validation are also proved to be valid.(3)This research has to a certain extent, set up the Norm Standard. The T score is adopted, with 50 as the mean score, and 10 as the standard deviation. The scores are considered high if above 60, and low if below 40. The typical features of separate groups are described.(4)This research discusses the current situation and influencial factors of 1357 city residents with the help of PEOCRS. The results show the average score of scale and subscale is around 4, which is above the middle level. According to the levels of the scale, the choice tendency is "basic agreed". There are significant differences on variables of PE of city residents, like age, education, length of residency, belief and living region, through no significant gender difference is found. The results of regression analysis show that only six variables enter regression equation and have significantly direct effects on PE. Respectively they are education (master's degree and above), age (60 years and older,20 years and younger,21-30), region (central China), belief (nullifidian), among which education (master's degree and above) accounts for the most significant predictive power.