Development and assessment of Adolescent Boys Stress Questionnaire (ABSQ-2015)

Development and assessment of Adolescent Boys Stress Questionnaire (ABSQ-2015)

Published in ICCR-JNR Journal

Abstract:

Aim-The study aim was to develop and assess an instrument to measure stress level among adolescent boys in relation to school, family, personal and social life.

Methods-Before administering the ABSQ-2015 to adolescent boys (N=380), experts from nursing and psychology in research, practice, tool development reviewed it twice, known as two step validation process. Reliability, construct validity assessment such as content, face, contrasting groups and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was done. Out of 26 items, 16 items were selected and loaded as three factors after EFA, deemed to be interpretable and meaningful.

Results-The assessment of ABSQ-2015 supported construct validity (0.93), reliability (0.97) and Factor analysis KMO and Bartlett's Test 0.82 (P<0.01) which is highly significant.

Conclusion-The ABSQ-2015 is found to useful psychologically and statistically to elicit the stress level among adolescent boys effectively in relation to various determinants of life.

Keywords – Adolescence, adolescent boys, Research instrument, Standardized tool, Stress questionnaire, developing tool
  

Full PDF_ABSQ-2015 

 

Concept of education

Concept of education

Education is a process of stimulating learning, acquiring knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and proper attitude. The commonly used methods are story telling, discussion, teaching, demonstration, training and research. It takes place under the guidance of teachers or educators. It carries out in formal and informal settings.

The word 'education' is derived from the latin 'educatio', which means ' a bringing up'. The another term used for education is 'Pedagogy"; pedo means child and logos means discussion.

There are two methods of education: formal and informal education. The formal education is a structured teaching learning process carried out in institutions. The formal education is divided into stages like preschool, primary school, secondary school, college or university. Informal education takes place in homes, work places or through daily interactions and shared relationships among members of society.

Definition of education

John Dewey, an American philosopher and educational reformer defines education is the development of all capacities in the individual which will enable him to control his environment and fulfill his possibilities. The role of education is to teach a person to manage one's own immediate surroundings in a productive manner. He recommends innovations in the education system helps the youngsters to grab the opportunities arising out of societal changes, so that they can fulfill the possibilities.  

According to Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement against British rule, education is the all round development of child and man includes body, mind and spirit. He also states that education is a process of developing three H's: head, heart and hand. He means the development of intellectual, spiritual and physical factors in a person.

Redden, philosopher states that education is the deliberate and systematic influence exerted by the mature person upon the immature through instructions, discipline and harmonious development of physical, intellectual, aesthetic, social and spiritual powers of human being according to individual and social needs. 

To conclude, education consists of inculcating good habits, training of five senses and memory, proper development of imagination and strengthening of will to change impossible things as possible things.

Best Scientific Paper Award 2016

Best Scientific Paper Award

I have presented a scientific paper on "Longitudinal investigation of lived experience among disaster victims of South Indian floods 2015: To develop a Concatenated Disaster Crisis (CDC) model using phenomenographical framework analysis" in an International Conference on disaster risk reduction and role of nurse, conducted by College of Nursing, Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamilnadu, India on 17.11.2016 & 18.11.2016. I have received "Best Paper Award" for my presentation. Thank you very much for your help and support.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research
Qualitative research is a process of putting data together from many sources in an effort to arrive at a holistic understanding of a phenomenon.

A qualitative design;

• is flexible and elastic
• can combine various data collection strategies
• strives to understand the whole
• requires ongoing analysis of the data formulate strategies

Preparation for a qualitative research

A researcher has to prepare themselves for conducting qualitative research in advance;

• Selection of title of the study or problem to be studied
• Plan design and data collection methods
• Select the setting and decide the nature of the participants
• Identify the ‘gate keepers’ who can provide access to important sources of data
• Determine time, money and resources availability for data collection

Phases in a qualitative study
The researcher conducts a qualitative study in three phases: orientation phase, exploration phase and confirmation phase.

• Orientation phase

The qualitative researcher enters into a study ‘not knowing what is not known’ that will make the researcher to drive forward.

• Exploration phase

The researcher explores the different aspects of the phenomenon. The questions to be asked to participants are shaped by the researcher.

• Confirmation phase

To confirm their findings trustworthy, the researcher often goes back and discusses their understanding with the study participants. 

Types of data collection strategies
The data collection strategies can be cross sectional or longitudinal. In cross sectional research, the data collection will be conducted at one point of time. In longitudinal research, the researcher conducts multiple data collection points over an extended time period.

Setting for qualitative research study
The qualitative researchers prefer natural setting to collect data; however, they conduct study in a variety of natural contexts to study phenomena extensively. 

Major types of qualitative research studies
The qualitative research traditions derived mainly from anthropology (culture), philosophy (lived experience), psychology (behavior), sociology (socially related) and socio linguistics (human communication). The major traditions which the qualitative researchers followed are;

• Ethnography
• Phenomenology
• Grounded theory

Ethnography
This research tradition focuses on the culture of a group of people. The main objective is to learn about a specific culture. The ethnographic researchers should use either one of perspectives; emic perspective or etic perspective. An emic perspective is the view of the culture as an insider or member of the community. An etic perspective is the view of the culture by an outsider. However, the ethnographers focus to acquire from emic perspectives. Some cultural experience is deeply embedded and members may not consciously aware of it. In this scenario, the researcher use ‘tactic knowledge’ to acquire information about the culture. Ethnography is time consuming and may take several months to get overall understanding of a culture. The researchers have to actively participated in a cultural group to develop intimacy with them. The ethnographers strive to acquire three types of information:

• Cultural behavior (What members do?)
• Cultural artifacts (What members do make and use?)
• Cultural speech (What people say?)

These study results provide an insight on health belief and practices.
The ethnography can be divided into two:

• Macro ethnography; study on culture broadly, for example: culture of a village
• Micro ethnography; study on culture which is narrowly defined, for example: culture of a tribal women.

Phenomenology
This approach strives to explore about people’s life experiences. The researcher conducts an enquiry regarding the experiences by the people in a given phenomena. The phenomenologist investigates subjective phenomena in the belief that reality is grounded in people’ lived experiences. There are two aspects of phenomenology: descriptive and interpretive phenomenology. In descriptive phenomenology, the researcher explores what people experience in regards to a phenomenon. In interpretive phenomenology, the researcher investigates how they interpret those experiences. The investigators believed that lived experience gives an idea to each person’s perception of a particular phenomenon. The phenomenologists are interested in four aspects of lived experience: lived space/spatiality, lived body/ corpeality, lived time/temporality and lived human relation/relationality.
In a phenomenologic study, the main data source is in depth conversations with the researcher and informant as participants. The researcher facilitates the informants to describe lived experience in a series of interview sessions. The sample size can be limited from 10 to 20, based on attaining of data saturation. The other data collection methods in phenomenology are participation, observation and introspective reflection.
The data analysis involves the following steps; bracketing, intuiting, analyzing and describing. Bracketing refers to the process of identifying and holding in abeyance pre conceived beliefs and opinions about the phenomena under study. Intuiting occurs when the researcher remains open to the meaning attributed to the phenomenon by those who have experienced it. Then, the researcher can proceed to analysis phase includes extracting significant statements, categorizing and making sense of the essential meaning of the phenomenon. Finally, the researcher defines the phenomenon with quotes.

Grounded theory
The grounded theory roots on social interaction and the interpretation they attach to social symbols like language. It is the study of social process and social structures. It explains the social and psychological stages that characterize a particular event. It also generates comprehensive explanation of phenomena that are grounded in reality. During data collection, the research questions are emerged from the data. The data collection, data analysis and sampling of participants occur simultaneously. A procedure referred to as constant comparison is used to develop and refine theoretically relevant categories and to identify the basic problems. The categories are compared with data so that commonalities and variations can be determined. In depth interviews and observation methods can be used for data collection. Typically, a grounded theory study involves interviews with a sample of about 20-50 informants.

Techniques of research control

Techniques of research control
Research control eliminates the influences of extraneous variables in the study so that true relationship between the independent and dependent variables can be understood. It excludes the contaminating factors that might affect the relationship between the variables. For example, the researcher wants to study depression among post partum women; the dependent variable is level of depression and independent variable is past partum women. There are other possibilities which affect the level of depression among post partum women such as age, socio economic status and marital status. If a researcher wants to study true relationship between independent and dependent variable, the extraneous variable has to be controlled. The extraneous factors can be divided into two;

• External factors
• Internal factors

Control of external factors
The external factors to be controlled in research are environment, time, culture and so on. To control the environmental influence on data collection, the researcher has to select the environment in natural or artificial setting according to the problem to be studied. Depending on the research topic, the relationship between dependent and independent variable may be influenced by the time of day, month and year. In these cases, the researcher should ensure the constancy of time during data collection.
Control of internal factors
Controlling internal factors such as gender, hereditary is doubtful in research. There are a few methods formulated o control subject characteristics to protect the research topic from the contamination of extraneous variables.
Methods are;

• Randomization
• Homogeneity
• Matching

Randomization
It means the selection of participants randomly, without any conscious decisions by the researcher. Randomization of study participants controls all possible sources of extraneous variables. For example, random assignment of subjects to experimental and control group would equalize the distribution of variables such as age, gender and neutralizes the influences of extraneous variables.
Homogeneity
When randomization is not feasible, the researcher can select the subjects who are homogenous with respect to extraneous variables are included in the study. Homogeneity means the researcher selects the study participants based on important extraneous variables such as specific age group, gender, education and so on. The main limitation of the homogeneity is that results of the study can be generalized only to the type of subjects participated.
Matching
During case control study, the researcher selects the study participants based on relevant extraneous variables and randomly divided into case control groups. This technique used to form comparable groups in case control design.

Classification of research design based on purpose

Classification of research design based on purpose
Survey research
The researcher collects the data regarding incidence, prevalence and distribution of variables of with in population through survey. The survey reports are based on self reports and respondents answer to the questions raised by the researcher. The common method for data collection is personal, face to face interview, interview by telephone and self administered questionnaire. The survey research is suitable for extensive data collection among large population and can focus on wide range of topics at a time.
Evaluation research
It helps to evaluate a process, program, treatment or policy. It can be cross sectional, longitudinal or experimental/non experimental. Based on the aim of evaluation, it can be classified into three;

1. Process analysis
2. Outcome analysis
3. Impact analysis

• Process analysis

A process analysis evaluates the process of implementing a new program or procedure and assesses the functioning in actual situation.

• Outcome analysis

An outcome analysis evaluates the final goals of the program, which are achieved after an implementation of program or process.

• Impact analysis

Impact analysis evaluates the net effects or impacts of the program after implementation of program or process.
Outcome research
Outcome research evaluates the effectiveness of health care services in an organization. This research conducts usually as part of global assessment. This types of assessment helps to appraise and document the quality of nursing care in an organization.

Classification of research design based on time dimension

Classification of research design based on time dimension
The designs can be classified based on when and how often data will be collected in a study. The data can be collected at a single point in time or more than one occasion. 

There are four situations in which it is a appropriate to design a study with multiple points of data collection.
1. Time related process- Depends on how phenomena evolved over time, for example, wound healing process.
2. Time sequenced phenomena- It is very important to ascertain the sequencing of phenomena. For example, the researcher has to make sure that pregnancy contributes to diabetes mellitus and not diabetes mellitus precedes pregnancy.
3. Comparative purposes- Here, multiple data points are used to compare phenomena over time.
4. Enhancement of research control- The researcher collects data at multiple points to enhance the interpretability of the results. For example, the collection of pre test data with demographic variables allows the researcher to detect for initial group difference. 

Cross sectional design
The researchers collect the data at one point in time and describe the status of phenomena or relationships among phenomena. For example, the researchers assess the level of depression among post partum women and test the relationship between independent (age, socio economic status and level of education) and dependent variables (level of depression). Advantages of cross sectional designs are economical and easy to conduct the studies for the researcher. A major disadvantage of conducting a cross sectional study is that problems arise when society changes rapidly. The researcher can not generalize the cross sectional study findings to a rapid changing society.
Longitudinal design
In this design, the researcher collects the data over an extended time period, identifies changes over time and sequence phenomena like a chain, which is an essential to establish causality.
Longitudinal studies are three types;

1. Trend studies
2. Panel studies
3. Follow up studies

Trend studies
Trend studies help the researcher to collect the data by drawing samples from general population over time with respect to a phenomenon. The researcher draws different samples from same population at repeated intervals, examines the changes at present and makes predictions about future. Foe example,predicting nursing shortage in coming years.
Panel studies
The researcher collects the data from the same participants at different period of time. With the same participants, the researcher examines the changes and identify the reasons fro change. The major problem with the panel studies are subject attrition. Subject attrition is defined as dropping of study participants during the study.
Follow up studies
In follow up studies, the researcher collects the data subsequently, especially after an intervention. In non experimental studies, the sample may be followed periodically to assess the changes in the variables. For example, weight gain among premature infants.