Development Of3～6Years Old Children’s Psychological Security Scale

The world is changeable with high-speed development of science and technology.Psychological security becomes a hot topic for general public in modern society. It also becomesa popular research issue for researchers in recent years. Psychological security refers to asubjective psychological feeling of individual. It is an objective existence. It is subject to theinfluence of subjective experience and the external environment. Psychological securityrepresents a strong sense of control of self and the outside world as well as the feeling ofconfidence and freedom out of fear and anxiety. Studies have shown that psychological securitywas significantly related to individual academic achievement, social adaptation and happiness.People with psychological security have fighting spirit and confidence. They live morecomfortable, free and easy and positive in the society which is full of threats and insecurity.Psychological security accompanies a person’s whole life and has important influence on thevarious stages of individual development. Especially, it has a decisive significance for3~6yearsold children. If a person has a good psychological security in his early childhood, he can developa better personality and social adjustment. However, few existing empirical researches involvingyoung children’s psychological security and especially the lack of measurement tools lead to theweakness in this area. Therefore, the content of this study is the development of3~6year oldchildren’s psychological security scale. The objective, process and the results of the research areas follows:1. Objective: Develop3~6years old children’s psychological security scale as an operableinstrument for assessing the psychological security status of children. Construct the theoreticalstructure of children’s psychological security. Analyze children’s psychological security basedon developing the scale.2. Process: Develop the questionnaire by strict procedures, including consulting literature,collecting items, developing and forecasting the questionnaire, producing a formal questionnaireafter items analysis and exploratory factor analysis, testing in due form, using confirmatoryfactor analytic approach and evaluating reliability and validity.3. Results:(1)This questionnaire consists of28items. Psychological security comprises six factors:sense of ability, sense of independence, sense of psychological security in parenting, sense ofpsychological security about teacher and friends, sense of psychological security in public, senseof avoiding stranger.(2)The questionnaire based on an exploratory factor analysis was informed that all theobjective factors load above0.497, and explain60.985%of the total variance.(3)The result of confirmatory factor analysis shows that indexes such as NC, SRMR, RMSEA, GFI, NFI, PGFI, PNFI and CN can reach the standard which indicates that the modelfits the data well.(4)The psychological security scale has good reliability and validity. It could be used as anevaluative implement on child’s psychological security.(5)This research explores the demographic effects on3~6years old children’spsychological security. The results show that total points of psychological security havesignificant difference in gender, but have no significant difference in age and grade.Simultaneously, demographic variables (sex， age and grade) have significant effect onpsychological security’s sub-traits.