The measurement of psychological literacy: a first approximation.

Lynne D Roberts,Brody Heritage,Natalie Gasson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00105

Abstract

Psychological literacy, the ability to apply psychological knowledge to personal, family, occupational, community and societal challenges, is promoted as the primary outcome of an undergraduate education in psychology. As the concept of psychological literacy becomes increasingly adopted as the core business of undergraduate psychology training courses world-wide, there is urgent need for the construct to be accurately measured so that student and institutional level progress can be assessed and monitored. Key to the measurement of psychological literacy is determining the underlying factor-structure of psychological literacy. In this paper we provide a first approximation of the measurement of psychological literacy by identifying and evaluating self-report measures for psychological literacy. Multi-item and single-item self-report measures of each of the proposed nine dimensions of psychological literacy were completed by two samples (N = 218 and N = 381) of undergraduate psychology students at an Australian university. Single and multi-item measures of each dimension were weakly to moderately correlated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of multi-item measures indicated a higher order three factor solution best represented the construct of psychological literacy. The three factors were reflective processes, generic graduate attributes, and psychology as a helping profession. For the measurement of psychological literacy to progress there is a need to further develop self-report measures and to identify/develop and evaluate objective measures of psychological literacy. Further approximations of the measurement of psychological literacy remain an imperative, given the construct's ties to measuring institutional efficacy in teaching psychology to an undergraduate audience.

Highlights

The past decade has seen a growing expectation on higher education institutions to prepare their graduates for an increasingly complex, rapidly changing world in which the employees of the future need to be highly-skilled, adaptable, flexible, self-aware, and intuitive problem-solvers with a global outlook
PHASE ONE DATA Prior to conducting analyses to test the relatedness of the facets of psychological literacy, the factor structure of each scale measure was examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; see Table 2) to examine whether a one-factor model was sufficient to describe the factor structure of each measure, and the internal reliability determined using Cronbach’s alpha
CFA and internal reliability tests were not conducted for the Psychology Misconceptions Test as this is a knowledge test rather than a scale measure

Summary

Introduction

The past decade has seen a growing expectation on higher education institutions to prepare their graduates for an increasingly complex, rapidly changing world in which the employees of the future need to be highly-skilled, adaptable, flexible, self-aware, and intuitive problem-solvers with a global outlook. One particular difficulty for the discipline of psychology is that unlike graduates of other health professions (e.g., physiotherapy, occupational therapy), psychology students are not eligible for full professional registration directly upon graduation This is likely to be contributing to reports from students of psychology that career pathways are not clear (Taylor et al, 2010). Alongside this has been discussion of the broader skills of university graduates, and how they are prepared to act as “global citizens” with the ability to apply their knowledge to local, national, and international communities in ethical and socially responsible ways for the greater good (Cranney et al, 2011a). Within this context two key constructs in psychology have emerged, the concepts of psychological literacy and the psychologically literate citizen

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