DEVELOPMENT, APPROBATION AND STANDARDIZATION OF “SCALE OF INCESTUOUS PERSONALITY” QUESTIONNAIRE

Abstract

Taking into account the current needs of modern national psychodiagnostics, and having discovered that Ukraine lacks valid tools that investigate and check the likelihood of sexual abuse by one person of another’s personal boundaries, the article authors have developed, tested and standardized the author’s questionnaire: “Scale of incestuous personality” (Glushchenko N. A., Dushkevich M.M.). The study was carried out from February 2019 to December 2020, included a pilot study with people who had experienced incest trauma and a further step-by-step study of the psychometric characteristics of the newly created questionnaire. The main sample consisted of 267 Ukrainians, with the age ranged from 18 to 62 years old, who lived in 19 regions of Ukraine, belonged to heterogeneous professional groups and had different educational levels. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was determined using the Cronbach's Alpha coefficient, which was a = 0.90, which indicated excellent reliability of the proposed method. This psychological diagnostic instrumentation showed good retest reliability (Pearson's coefficient r = 895, p ≤ 0.01). The authors proposed a theoretical model for the questionnaire structure, which described the internal validity, identified the main categories determining an individual’s manifestations of incestuousness: violation of psychological and physical boundaries, violations of physical body perception; violations of sexual and personal identity; rejection of intimacy and sexual arousal; confusion of the concepts of sex and love; depressive moods; signs of oversexualization; sexual dysfunction; transfer of control; emotional deprivation; having secrets; difficulties in building interpersonal relationships; defectiveness and shame; social alienation and so on. The established expert commission found that the methodology has a mutually consistent and homogeneous inclusion of emotional, cognitive, motivational and behavioral components of the examined phenomenon of incestuousness. The constructive validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by its factorial structure, which consists of 5 scales: “Psycho-emotional distrust”, “Sexualized identification”, “Emotional-anxious identification”, “Openly controlling intimacy” and “General indicator of incestuousness”. All scales are compared with the theoretical model and interpreted. The presence of significant correlations between the "Scale of incestuous personality" (Glushchenko N.A., Dushkevich M.M.) and methods studying the internal organization of a personality, maladaptive schemes, attitudes towards sex, intimate life, personal boundaries and existing traumatic experience indicates the convergent validity of the developed questionnaire. Statistical differences by gender were revealed for the general indicator of incestuousness; all other indicators of the scale did not depend on the respondents’ age and / or place of residence. Using the definition of stans, test norms for men and women were calculated, and levels of incestuousness were determined and interpreted.