Construction and application of both adolescent multi-domain risk behavior questionnaire and risk perception questionnaire

Abstract

According to the Domain Specific Theory (DST) in risk-taking, this study intended to construct adolescent risk-taking behavior questionnaire and risk perception questionnaire inferred many domains for studying the adolescent risk-taking behavior and risk perception. With 422 middle school students in Yinchuan as subjects to develop the questionnaire. 2402 middle school students in Ningxia and Anhui were surveyed using the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) indicated that both of the questionnaires contain four domains named society, recreation, safe and moral, and 33 items, which could explain 41.25% and 45.5% of the total variance respectively. The split-half reliability were 0.848, 0.890 and the coefficient of internal consistency were 0.900 and 0.938. The fit indices of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were as follows: χ(2)/df = 8.36 and 6.73, RMSEA = 0.066 and 0.054, NFI = 0.97 and 0.97, CFI = 0.97 and 0.97 separately. Gender difference in adolescent risk-taking behavior and risk perception were noticed, with F (1, 2288) = 56.256, P < 0.001, F (1, 2288) = 10.766, P = 0.05. The adolescent risk-taking behaviors increased with age, F (2, 2288) = 140.067, P < 0.001, while the risk perception decreased with age, F (2, 2288) = 54.900, P < 0.001. Adolescent on the highest score was in the social risk, followed by recreation, morality and safety. Our results showed the newly developed scales were reliable and valid enough to be applicable to measure the adolescent risk-taking behavior and risk perception.