engleski

Preliminary evidence on some psychometric characteristics of the Forgiveness Scales and the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale on the sample of Croatian adolescents

During the course of their lives, people are involved in different forms of social relationships which can wrong them. Forgiveness represents the possibility to overcome and avoid the negative consequences. It also represents a multi‐dimensional process consisting of changes on emotional, cognitive, motivational and behavioural levels, so its definition differs depending on various theoretical models. There are a number of different instruments for measuring the likelihood or willingness of forgiveness. One is used to measure the level of disposition, and the others measure it on a level specific for each individual event by measuring the damage that a person has suffered (McCollough and Witvliet, 2002). The goal of this research was to assess some basic psychometric characteristics on two Forgiveness scales on the sample of high school students. The authors translated the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale – FLS (Rye et al., 2001), which contains 10 hypothetical situations and the Forgiveness Scale – FS (Rye et al., 2001) consisting of 15 statements on forgiveness after certain events that wronged the participant. Certain sociodemographic data has also been gathered. 377 third and fourth graders from four Zadar high schools participated in this research. The factor analysis was done on both questionnaires where the results are not completely consistent with the findings of the authors. The factor analysis of the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale points out one general factor of forgiveness likelihood as an indicator of the general disposition to forgive in different situations. The factor analysis of the Forgiveness Scale did not completely confirm the earlier results obtained by this scale (Rye et al., 2001) where a two‐factor structure was found. Preliminary results indicate the need for additional adjustment of the Croatian version of FS scale before possible applications to samples of adolescents in Croatia.

forgiveness likelihood ; youth ; psychometric validation of the questionnaire

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