The Development Of The Coping Scale For Community Inmates' Social Exclusion

The study aims at developing a coping style scale specially for community inmates' social exclusion on the basis of social exclusion theory,coping style theory and scale compilation principles,and provides a new quantitative method for community correction.This will contribute to enrich the research on social exclusion of prisoners in the community and coping styles,conduce to the resocialization of community inmates and expansion of the professional influence of psychology and sociology in the field of community corrections.Based on the relevant thesis,we talked with 30 community prisoners in depth and then formed the factors and items of the scale according to the results of the interviews and existing theories.In accordance with the suggestions of psychologists,community prisoners and community correction workers,some of the items were rearranged and some were deleted.The initial scale was formed.291 community inmates were sampled in a city in Heilongjiang Province for pre-testing.And the formal scale was formed on the basis of project analysis,exploratory factor analysis and reliability test.351 community inmates from five representative districts of the city were selected for official testing.We tested the reliability and validity and investigated the social exclusion coping styles of the prisoners in the community.After analysis,the coping scale for community inmates' social exclusion included seven dimensions: solving,seeking help,adaption and rationalization,expressing rationally,transferring and escaping,enduring as well as blaming.The reliability analysis showed that the Cronbach' ? of the total scale was 0.912,the sub-scales' ? were from 0.610 to 0.843;Split-half of the scale was 0.864,the sub-scales' split-half were from 0.622 to 0.880.That is,the reliability coefficients were fit of the psychology measure.As for validity,it can be considered that the content validity of the scale is good due to the compilation process.The coefficient correlation between items and their own dimensions were from 0.471 to 0.837,and the coefficient correlation among the dimensions were from-0.192 to 0.675.That is,the structure validity of the scale is good.In summary,this study has initially constructed the formal scale for community inmates' social exclusion,which contained 43 items finally,and composed by 7 dimensions.The scale was of high reliability and fair validity and was reliable and effective for research.The results of the study confirm that there were significant differences in some dimensions of social exclusion coping styles of community prisoners such as gender,age,family environment,education level,whether there are criminal records,and the reasons for judgment.This study has a reference value for analyzing the community inmates' coping style and the causes facing the social exclusion during practical work,which helps to improve the level of their social reintegration.