Development Of The Mental Health Scale With A Healthy Personality Orientation For College Students

The mental health is a cuntinuum, one end of it is mental illness or mental disease, on the other end is healthy personality, in the middle there are the normal mental function or other moderate mental health status. As negative mental health, normal mental function has been too much attention, and even led the study of psychology, whereas, a healthy personality as positive mental health is increasingly being everyone's concern. College students with a healthy personality always have noble goal to pursue and develop constructive relationships, engaged in the creation of social value, eager to life's challenges, and search for life and enrich the meaning of life. There are important theoretic meanings and applied values on establishment of an effective Mental Health Scale for college students.This study want to integrate theoretic discussion and empirical research, base itself on Chinese and use west research for reference, develop traditional spirit and fit modern demands. It used many methods and perspectives to systematically explore basic psychology problem of positive mental health which fit for college students in China, and develop measurement tools.Research on the basic idea is, first of all, use open-ended questionnaire and content analysis to explore the meaning of mental health; and then use the measurement method to measure the structure of mental health, and to define their operations; and then, use of related regression, structural equation and other methods to explore the characteristics of mental health and its influencing factors. The paper has five sections and includes 10 researches, and 4498 has been involved in test.The first section is literature study which includes mental health theory and mental health tools. This paper summarized the west positive psychology, the Chinese traditional culture and contemporary psychological harmony, and also combed home and abroad a number of recent studies. Assessment tools review found that the majority of the lack of systematic approach to research, lack of culture with Chinese characteristics based on the methodology.The second section is primary exploring on structure of mental health of university students. The use of literature review and open-ended questionnaire clarify the concept of mental health which suit for contemporary college students. Data show that a wide range of mental health behavior, mental health scale with a healthy personality orientation can reflect the characteristics of mental health of college students.The third section is theory construction and scale development of mental health scale with a healthy personality orientation for college students and includes 2 researches. By summarizing foregoing researches, it constructed the frame of mental health. By practical structure of mental health of college students, it uses methods of closed questionnaire and exploring factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and correlation research to develop Mental Health Scale for College Students (MHS-CS) which had six dimensions and 27 items. Validity study of mental health scale of college students is a combination of convergent validity and discriminate validity in two ways. This study used "SCL-90", "University Personality Inventory", "16PF", "Self Consistency and Congruence", "The Mental Health Continuum". Data show that all dimensions of the mental health scale are in line with the requirements of psychometric validity of the level of.The fourth section is mental health characteristics of college students. It used methods of correlation to study the mental health differences between different genders, grades, schools and area. Data show that score in the emotional regulation and the courage to challenge of female group was significantly lower than male group, the gender difference was not significant in other dimensions of mental health scale. Grades difference was significant not only in the mental health scale but also on all dimensions. And students from different schools were significant different in the happy experience, the active learning and the goal pursuit. College students from city have better mental health than those from town or country.The fifth section is correlative study of mental health. The correlative study obtained on the basis of the classification of Huang's Perfect Personality theory, from the personality foundation to the function of mental health. This section includes four studies.Study 7 tested the relationship between mental health and self-support, self-confidence and self-esteem. Evidence suggested an association of mental health and higher self conception. There were positive correlation between mental health and self-support, self-confidence, self-esteem, and mental health could be predicted well by self-support, self-confidence and self-esteem. Study 8 concerned the relationship between mental health and social support, and found that perceived social support can predict mental health well. Study 9 used Adolescence Time Management Disposition and Tuckman Procrastination Scale to demonstrate that mental health is the result of time management. Those college students who were good at managing time, never delay in there school work have better mental health. Function of academic achievement and mental health was investigated in Study 10, results show that mental health was contribute to academic achievement, active learning can especially predict academic achievement.The main contribution of this study is in the context of Chinese culture, in the frame of healthy personality, by systematic researching, got the meaning and framework of college students' mental health, and developed the Mental Health Scale with a healthy personality orientation which supply a gap in China of positive orientation mental health measure for college students.In the last part, the dissertation gave a comprehensive discussion, the main conclusions were drawn from those researches as following: (1) This paper set up the initial version of Mental Health Scale for College Students (MHS-CS), which includes six dimensions: happy experience, interpersonal harmony, active learning, emotional regulation, goal pursuit and courage to challenge. (2) Factor analyses studies showed the reliability and validity of mental health scale for college students (MHS-CS) fit the requirement of psychometrics. (3) There are individual differences in mental health, gender, grade, school and even area may cause performance of mental health different. (4) Mental health people have high stability, high excitability, low anxiety, low stress, self-support, self-confidence, self-esteem and other personality characteristics. (5) Mental health students have harmony in the inner experience, perceiving more social support, good management of time, less delay, and higher academic performance.