Psychometric Verification of a Refined Version of the "Unembodiment on the Internet" Questionnaire

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">The alienation of the individual's own physical body, which until recently was associated mainly with the sphere of psychiatry, is strongly associated by modern researchers with the practice of using the Internet. The lack of scientific psychological grounds for studying the technological disembodiment of a user causes a deficiency of tools designed to diagnose the corresponding phenomenology. The article presents a revised version of the questionnaire "Unembodiment on the Internet" (2021), the construct of which goes back to the clinical concept of unembodiment, which belongs to the famous British existential psychologist R. Laing. The item base of the methodology has been changed and expanded in order to be more relevant to the subject of study. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire was tested during a psychodiagnostic examination. It involved 200 Internet users (women and men equally). The mean age of the respondents was 20.72 years (SD=5.99). The scale of the previous version of the "Unembodiment on the Internet" questionnaire, &ldquo;Unembodiment as Virtualization&rdquo;, was supplemented by a new one, &ldquo;Preference for Technological Disembodiment&rdquo;, which specifies the user's attitude towards their special status in the cyberspace, and replaced the &ldquo;Preference of the Internet&rdquo; scale, which reflected a more general motivation. The &ldquo;Vitality of the Embodied Self&rdquo; scale in the refined questionnaire is divided into two: the scale of the same name, which implies broad manifestations of the embodied self, and the scale of the &ldquo;Embodied Whole Self&rdquo;, which implies the embodiment of the mental self in the physical body itself. The empirical construct in general corresponds to the theoretical one. The internal consistency scores of the questionnaire scales range from 0.82&ndash;0.91 for different criteria. External convergent validity was confirmed by the Chen Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS).</p>