A Primary Design Of University Students' Optimism Questionnair

Optimism, as an essential personality trait, is an individual's cognitive and emotional inclination toward the current and future condition. Optimism is an important topic within positive psychology, which facilitates adjusting individual's psychological and physical health level, and therefore has significant academic and practical value. The college students' optimism measurements currently utilized in China are derived from Western countries, which are lack of localization validity. Therefore, the purpose of this current article is to develop a localized optimism questionnaire which can be applied to the Chinese college students.Based on the literature review, the open-question survey, and experts' advice, the author developed a model of college students' optimism structure, and had collected some items which applied to college students. Exploratory factorial analysis of the trial questionnaire and the confirmatory factorial analysis of the formal questionnaire were conducted during the development of the college students' optimism questionnaire. The validity and reliability test in several dimensions were also implemented. The results are as follows.1. Optimism of college students is a complex personality trait which includes positive cognition, negative cognition, and happiness.2. The validity and reliability test showed that the questionnaire has high internal consistency reliability, split-half reliability, content validity, construct validity, and criterion validity, which could be applied as the college students' optimism questionnaires.3. Optimism is significantly positively related to life satisfaction, and negatively related to depression. While the level of optimism and the degree of life satisfaction of optimists are higher than that of pessimists, the degree of depression is lower than that of pessimists.4. The cognitive style of optimism consists of positively cognitive optimistic inclination, positive-negative inclination, vague inclination, and negatively cognitive pessimistic inclination. The students with positively cognitive optimistic inclination always experience high degree of life satisfaction and low degree of depression, which has the most adaptive value. On the contrary, negatively cognitive pessimistic inclination relates to the lower level of mental health. Meanwhile, the existence of positive-negative inclination indicated that the cognitive style of optimism is not unique. Instead, it is compatible.5. There is no significant difference in the population statistics variable, such as gender, grade, and native place, etc. But there is significant difference in major, for example, the level of optimism of students in science and engineering are higher than that of students in arts.