The Construction And Standardization Of "College Student Adaptability Inventory

The course of fixing in with new environment is adaptation, which includes familiariz -ing the environment and knowing about its demands, and adjusting actively one's somatic and mental habitus to make oneself develop better. How to regard and deal with adaptation problems, which is in relation to one's adaptablity, will affect not just personal development, but social development in the future. Thus it must be taken into account by us.Adaptablity indicates the degree of one's interaction with his or her surroundings efficiently and adequately. At present we have no common viewpoints about the structure of adaptability. From a person-environment relation perspective, this study gains a "Seven-factor-correlation Model" of college student adaptability, referring to the findings of relevant theoretical research and open-ended survey. These factors contain "Learning Adaptability", "Interpersonal Adaptability", "Self Adaptablity", "Career Choice Adaptablity", "Livelihood Self-management Adaptablity", "Environmental General Evaluation" and "Somatic-mental Symptom".We compile items in accordance with the foregoing theoretical constitution. After item evaluation and pretesting, "College Student Adaptability Inventory" (CSAI) comes into being ultimately. With this inventory, we tested 1043 undergraduates of 8 colleges in Wuhan. Then using factor analysis, regression analysis, cluster analysis and discriminant analysis, we analyze the research data and find: (a) CSAI has good potency and reliability and validity with proving that it's reliable and valid as research implement, (b) "Interpersonal Adaptability" is the most important factor in the structure of college student adaptability, (c) "Interpersonal Adaptability" is more connected with measures of college students' somatic and mental health and life quality than other factors, (d) As predicted in our hypotheses, the seniors are the most strong in all kinds of adaptability. The freshmen are not the most weak in all of the factors, and on the contrary, their adaptability even surpasses that of the seniors in some aspects, e.g. "Environmental General Evaluation", (e) The results of cluster analysis show that three sorts of college students' scores on seven secondary scales have the same differences at three levels. The three sorts are respectively named after "Strong Type","Midst Type" and "Weak Type". We can directly classify new subjects by Fisher linear discriminant functions. We also find that "Environmental General Evaluation" variable has more potency in discriminating and classifying college students according to their adaptabilty.