Construction and Validation of the Character Strengths Scale for Youth (CSS-Youth)

Abstract

Character strengths are positive individual characteristics that may be expressed through thoughts, feelings and actions. The present study aimed to build an instrument to assess the virtues and character strengths of adolescents and to seek psychometric evidence for the scale. A total of 836 adolescents participated, between the ages of 14 and 18 and enrolled in high school, being 60.4% girls. Students responded to the Character Strengths Scale for Youth (CSS-Youth). Judges’ analysis indicated that CSS-Youth has evidence of content validity. Confirmatory factorial analysis allowed the extraction of five factors, and the alpha coefficient showed good accuracy. The initial psychometric data for CSS-Youth is promising, but further studies are necessary to find other validity evidence, as well as new analyses to test the factorial structure of the model used.

Changes in Character Virtues are Driven by Classroom Relationships: A Longitudinal Study of Elementary School Children

“…There is a line of character research that looks at specific character strengths, such as hope, bravery, and teamwork. Character strengths are positively related to well-being (Shoshani & Slone, 2013;Weber & Ruch, 2012;Dametto & Noronha, 2019), life satisfaction (Blanca et al, 2018;Park et al, 2004;Rashid et al, 2013), and positive affect (Weber et al, 2016). Youth who report higher character strengths tend to have fewer depressive symptoms later in adolescence (Gillham et al, 2011;Schutte & Malouff, 2018).…”

Medidas de Forças de Caráter para Crianças: revisão integrativa da literatura

“…Em adultos, as forças estão positivamente associadas a níveis elevados de felicidade e saúde mental (Demirci & Ekşi, 2018;Petkari & Ortiz-Tallo, 2016), de resiliência e autoeficácia (Martínez-Marti & Ruch, 2016). No cenário brasileiro, Noronha e Barbosa (2016) desenvolveram a Escala de Forças de Caráter para adultos, sendo que pesquisas a relacionaram a construtos como estilos parentais (Noronha & Batista, 2017), autorregulação emocional (Noronha & Batista, 2020b), satisfação com a vida (Noronha & Martins, 2016), bem-estar subjetivo (Oliveira, Nunes, Legal, & Noronha, 2016) e personalidade (Noronha & Campos, 2018), com resultados bastante favoráveis (Dametto & Noronha, 2019). Entretanto, há de se considerar que crianças e adultos podem apresentar diferenças quanto às forças, sendo que as crianças tendem a apresentar maiores níveis de otimismo, senso de coletividade e vitalidade, enquanto os adultos apresentam maior presença de liderança, pensamento crítico, autenticidade e apreciação do belo (Park & Peterson, 2006).…”