Based On Item Response Theory For Adolescent Mental Health Scale Preparation Of Applications

The purpose of the study is to prepare an adolescent sex health scalewith the support of IRT(Item Response Theory) so as to address thepsychological issue of adolescent sex and to come up with pertinentprecautionary measures against potential risks. As adolescence arrives,the awareness of sex characteristics due to physical growth presents achallenge to youngsters. Sex characteristics feature how to respond toexternal physical appearance, how to control the growing sexual maturity,how to deal with sexual desires, how to adopt a proper attitude and valuesconcerning sex, sexual attempts, how to integrate all the above emotions,attitudes and attempts into the sound development of self awareness.There are some factors that make the challenges youngsters face evenmore severe, such as the strange sexual arousal, the attention problemincurred by sexual appeal, the increasingly intimate physical encounters,and psychological vulnerability with regard to sexual encounter. Thepaper looked into potential risks concerning sex that youngsters areconfronted with and managed to root out the sources of these risks. Forsuch purpose, the paper adopted research methodologies of open-endquestionnaires and interviews. Having reviewed relevant literature, theauthor first put forward theoretical premises, and then presented aself-made adolescent sex health scale. With the support of IRT, the author eliminated unreasonable items, and further evaluated and assessed thedifficulty and the discrimination of each designed question. With theabove endeavors taken, the author came up with an item characteristiccurve and a test information function curve. Using exploratory andconfirmatory factors, the author undertook structure validity analysis. Theauthor verified the premises set earlier about IRT and model fitting, andrelied on structural equation model to verify structural validity.The findings of the research are as follows:(1)Being a single dimension, adolescent sex health scale can be revisedthrough IRT. The revised scale mentioned above has been proved to havemore reasonable discrimination and difficulty.(2)The three structural aspects of the scale, namely, sexual awareness,knowledge about sex, and sexual adapting, have been verified.(3)Proved to demonstrate satisfactory reliability and validity, theself-made adolescent sex health scale can be used as an adolescent sexhealth census tool.