Research On The Structure, Confirmatory Factor Analysis And Influencing Factors Of University Students' Character Strength

Character strength was a character of positive psychology, was excellence of human and core factor of individual personality traits. It was deemed as the key character for human beings'survival and development in positive psychology. By more and more studies, we found that the excellence of human was a main buffer and adjustor against mental illness. The development and training of the excellence of human to facilitate the healthy growth of an individual had turned to be a growing and exciting point of contemporary psychology knowledgement. So the study on the structure of character strength would full of academic meaning.This dissertation consists of five parts: Part I was a review of the literature. Part II contained the statement of the problem, purpose of the study, questions, significance of the study, and whole design. Part III was the demonstration part of this research. It contained two studies:In study one, characteristics of character strength were described by 35 university students, and prepared by qualitative analysis and semantic encoding。The structure model of university students'character strength was based on a comprehensive literature review.In study two, based on study one, the paper designed a 230 items original Character Strength Questionnaire for University Students, then 500 university students were evaluated. Based on the results of analysis for original questionnaire, developed the final questionnaire with 180 items. The formal questionnaire was issued to 1760 university students. We analyzed and tested the formal questionnaire by means of confirmatory factor analysis. As results showed, the structure model of character strength of university students is a model which consisted of 23 first level factors ( curiosity, judgment, citizenship, creativity, bravery, kindness, leadership, love, social intelligence, fairness, forgiveness, modesty, prudence, self-regulation, appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, love of learning, perspective, zest, persistence, authenticity ) and four second level factors ( wisdom, temperance, ability, virtue ) and one third level factor ( character strength). The research also studied the influence factors about the character strength in university students. We primary compared the university students'character strength on the gender, the singleton and non- singleton, parental rearing pattern, etc. Parental rearing pattern have more important influence on university students'character strength.The questionnaire has good validity and reliability.Part IV and Part V consists of the discussions, conclusions, putting forward good ideas for mental health education. The inadequacy and the research points in future are also lightened.