Scenes for Social Information Processing in Adolescence: Item and factor analytic procedures for psychometric appraisal.

Abstract

Relatively little is known about measures used to investigate the validity and applications of social information processing theory. The Scenes for Social Information Processing in Adolescence includes items built using a participatory approach to evaluate the attribution of intent, emotion intensity, response evaluation, and response decision steps of social information processing. We evaluated a sample of 802 Portuguese adolescents (61.5% female; mean age = 16.44 years old) using this instrument. Item analysis and exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures were used for psychometric examination. Two measures for attribution of intent were produced, including hostile and neutral; along with 3 emotion measures, focused on negative emotional states; 8 response evaluation measures; and 4 response decision measures, including prosocial and impaired social behavior. All of these measures achieved good internal consistency values and fit indicators. Boys seemed to favor and choose overt and relational aggression behaviors more often; girls conveyed higher levels of neutral attribution, sadness, and assertiveness and passiveness. The Scenes for Social Information Processing in Adolescence achieved adequate psychometric results and seems a valuable alternative for evaluating social information processing, even if it is essential to continue investigation into its internal and external validity.

A Cognitive Perspective for Understanding and Training Assertiveness

“…None of these studies, nevertheless, focused specifically on assertiveness. More recently, an evaluation instrument for SIP has, for the first time, included items on assertive responses (Vagos, Rijo, & Santos, 2016), and thus may serve to better explore how SIP applies to these behaviors. For now, we can only infer what SIP would be like as applied to assertiveness (see second column in Table 1), based on previous findings on assertiveness that might fit with this model, taken from the works reviewed above (see third column in Table 1).…”

Garantir a validade de conteúdo na construção de instrumentos: O caso do Cenas para Processamento de Informação Social na Adolescência

“…Accordingly, the thematic units rendered from the current work were, for the most part, directly translated into the subscales of the SSIPA that have been established via exploratory factor analysis (i.e., neutral and hostile attribution of intent; experiencing anger, sadness, and shame; and choosing to act assertively, passively, overtly agressively, and relationally agressively). The diverse evaluation criteria that were put forward as distinct response scales converted, however, into a single measure of evaluation of each type of social behavior (Vagos et al, 2016). The history of the SSIPA so far seems to sustain the relevance of further studies using it, namely considering validity in relation to other variables and sensitivity to diverse populations.…”

“…The Scenes for Social Information Processing in Adolescence (SSIPA; Vagos, Rijo, & Santos, 2016) is a self-report instrument specifically designed to assess how adolescents process social information when faced with customary, hypothetical, and ambiguous social situations. Its development was based on the social information processing (SIP) model (Crick & Dodge, 1994) and also took into consideration more recent assumptions.…”

“…Specifically, the respondent is asked to rate 1) the likelihood of attributing a neutral and a hostile intent to others; 2) the intensity of experiencing anger, sadness and shame in that situation; 3) the evaluation of assertive, passive, overtly aggressive, and relationally aggressive behavior options according to self-efficacy, personal and social goals, and moral/ social value, and 4) the likelihood of choosing such behavior options. Previous studies have provided psychometric appraisal for these measures namely evidence on their internal structure and internal consistency, proving them to be adequate for adolescent boys and girls (Vagos, et al, 2016). This is not the only instrument designed to assess social information processing in general, nor its expression specifically in adolescents (for a good example, see the likert type version of the Cuestionario del procesamiento de la información social; Calvete & Orue, 2009).…”

“…Though the psychometric evaluation of the SSIPA has been previously published (Vagos, et al, 2016) and may (indirectly) validate its construction process, very little was said about such process, other than that a participatory approach was used for developing its items. Developing items is part of the procedure necessary to construct a test, in addition to creating administration and scoring procedures, and submitting this information to qualitative analysis (Urbina, 2004).…”