The Development and Standardization of Psychometric Criteria of Attitude toward Adoption Questionnaire (ATAQ) and its Relation to Prosocial Behavior and Character Strengths

The preset study aimed to develop and standardize the psychometric criteria of attitude toward adoption questionnaire and its relation to prosocial behavior and character strengths.

The method of this study was descriptive survey. The research population included all citizens living in Behshahr (N = 156195). The sample size of the study was 500 subjects of whom 50 subjects were selected through pre-investigation study by available sampling method and 450 subjects were selected by multistage cluster sampling in the final study. The research tools included the attitude toward adoption questionnaire, Prosocial Tendencies Measure Revised (PTM-R) by Carlo et al (2003), and character strengths questionnaire by Seligman and Patterson (2004). The research analysis method was exploratory factor analysis and Pearson correlation coefficient.

The results of exploratory factor analysis by main components with varimax rotation indicated two components of attitude toward adoption being named respectively cognitive as the aspects of attitude toward adoption and behavioral-emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption. These two components explained 43.25% of the variance of the total sample. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to measure the reliability of the questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.709 for the whole questionnaire, 0.71 for the first component, and 0.713 for the second one. In addition, there was a significant positive relationship between desired social tendencies and the cognitive aspect of attitude toward adoption as well as the behavioral -emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption (P ≤ 0.01).

As a conclusion, the attitude toward adoption questionnaire has a desirable and appropriate validity and can be used as a useful tool for measuring the attitude toward adoption. Declaration of Interest: None