Development Of The Gratitude Scale Of College:Its Construction And Practice

Gratitude is the grace and help given by nature, others and society to generate awareness, emotional reactions and wishes to return action when the individual is in the process of growing up. Gratitude is an important content in ideological and moral construction and mental health education.It has an important role for the Students’ Moral and Healthy Personality Development. So it’s necessary to study the gratitude of college students. However, the gratitude studies of our country are still in its infancy, mainly focus on the study of concept, influencing factors, the relationship about gratitude and happiness, pro-social behavior. Gratitude has always been considered to be a purely positive psychology, as the study of literature,we find gratitude also has a negative component. Now national gratitude scales have not been tested for the localization of Chinese college students. This study is combined with Chinese culture background and tries from the positive and negative aspects to construction the gratitude of scale, and explore the characteristics of Chinese college students’gratitude, for the college’s gratitude education to provide targeted advice and scientific basis.Objective:(1) To explore the gratitude of college students psychological component, to construct the gratitude scale to adapt for Chinese cultural background.(2) Explore whether the gratitude is purely positive psychology.(3) Research on college students’ gratitude characteristics and demographic differences.Methods:(1) On the base of the analysis of the literature and gratitude theory, opened questionare, interviews, expert assessment,combined with Chinese cultural background, collection and determine the titles.(2) By the initial gratitude scale we survey420students from three universities in Tianjin, Hubei, Jiangxi, for project analysis and exploratory factor analysis by using SPSS17.0. the study find gratitude Scale include26topics, five factors.(3) By the official gratitude scale,we survey410students from university in Hubei, Jiangxi, Tianjin. Confirmatory factor analysis by LISREL8.70shows that the fit indices are at or close to the ideal value, these indicators reflect the degree of model has good fitness; once again verify the gratitude scale for college students with good construct validity. In addtion, the reliability of the gratitude scale for college students is fit for the measurement of psychology.(4) Use the official gratitude Scale of College Students to conduct applied research.Results:(1) The gratitude scale of college students divided into three parts, five factors. Gratitude cognition, gratitude emotion, gratitude behavior. The lucky of contentment and negative cognitive belong to the gratitude cognitive component, the enthusiastic happiness and negative experience belongs to the gratitude emotion component, the former reaction is positive emotions, the latter reaction is negative emotions. Return and help belong to the gratitude behavior ingredients.(2) The gratitude scale of college students has good reliability and validity, reasonable structure, it is fit for the scale of the requirements and can be used as tools to measure the gratitude level of college students.(3) Generally speaking, mostly students have high level of gratitude. Gratitude is not purely positive psychology, there are negative experience and negative cognitive, we should not neglect.(4) There are partly significant difference in the major, grade, gender, urban and rural, whether the only child, the school should be based on the characteristics of group for guidance and education.