Design and Psychometric Properties of Developmental Tasks Scale

Studies have showed that psycho-social performance is related to knowledge of developmental tasks. Due to loss of scale for developmental tasks’ assessment in the Iranian community, the present study was conducted to determine the psychometric properties of the developmental tasks scale.

Methods and Materials: 

The present study is psychometric, and the statistical sample comprised of 840 university students of different educational levels in 2019-20 in Tehran, who were selected through available sampling method, and asked to complete the developmental tasks scale prepared by the author, Ryff’s Scales Psychological Well-Being, and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. Data were analyzed using SPSS24 software, Lisrel version 8.8M, and Jesp version 0.16.4.0.

The results of exploratory factor analysis depicted the existence of 5 factors, which collectively determined 65.442 percent of the overall variance of the instrument, while the results of the confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the results of the former analysis. The overall reliability coefficient of the tool was obtained by Cronbach's alpha and Macdonald's coefficient 0.85. Moreover, the parameters of this scale were observed to have a significant positive correlation with Ryff’s psychological well-being scale and the positive emotion factor, but a significant negative correlation with the negative emotion factor.

The concept of human evolution proceeds in stages and each stage represents a sensitive period in which a person needs to perform the task of development related to that period. Good reliability and construct validity, adequate correlation between the factors, as well as convergent and divergent reliability with similar instruments showed that the developmental tasks scale is a suitable one for measuring developmental tasks of students and a reliable one for evaluating interventions in this respect.