A Study of Psychometric Properties of Shame Scale among Students of Shiraz University and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences

The feeling of shame is one of the most important moral self-conscious emotions which play a major role in interpersonal relationships and social adjustment. Therefore, it seems essential to provide instruments to measure this structure. The present paper aims to provide the necessary preliminaries in order to use Shame Scale designed by Rizvi (2009) among Iranian university students. In order to assess the validity of the scale, first, it was made sure that the data were normally distributed. Then, factor analysis with original components and varimax rotation method was used to discover factor structure. The correlation between this scale and other valid scales of measuring self-conscious emotions of shame was used as convergent validity and its correlation with happiness scale was used as divergent validity. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was also used to measure the scale reliability through the method of the internal consistency of items. Participants in this study were 231 university students (female=134 & male= 97) of Shiraz University and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The results indicated that shame scale in Iranian population has a multiple-factor structure called ‘moral transgression’ and ‘self-inadequacy’. The correlation between this scale and the self-conscious emotions scale indicated that Rizvi’s shame scale has a convergent validity. Moreover, the relation with happiness scale was used as the divergent validity index. The results were indicative of the fact that unlike two other components, moral transgression component did not have a significant relation with happiness. Furthermore, a comparison between boys’ and girls’ scores showed that females had higher scores in some components. In sum, results of this study confirmed convergent validity, divergent validity, and internal consistency of the scale suitable to be used in Iran. The shame scale being culture- dependent was discussed with regard to the results.