Contemporary psychology, Vol. 6 No. 1, 2003.
Original scientific paper
Awareness of self and others during high school period: a contribution to validation of the Social Awareness Inventory
Vera Ćubela Adorić
Abstract
The Social Awareness Inventory (SAI, Sheldon, 1996) is an instrument aimed to assess individual differences in the eight awareness forms as defined by the target (self vs. other), content (private vs. public self) and perspective (self vs. other's ). Previous administrations in groups of university students showed that the correlations between it's scales can be explained in terms of two dimensions (so-called divided self and grounded self), which seem to reflect the distinction between the self as known and knower. The aim of our study was to test the assumption that the two-factor structure of SAI's, which was obtained in university students, perhaps reflecting the outcome of some processes in the development of the self during adolescence. Therefore the SAI was administered in a group of 239 male and 240 female high school students from grades I to IV. In line with Sheldons's findings, the principal component analysis consistently provided solutions with two factors, whose association increased with the grade level. The results of the principal factor analysis, however, showed that the two factors in the latent structure of the SAI couldn't be reliably differentiated before the third grade. These apparently opposite patterns of the factor analysis results of the SAI were interpreted as reflecting two principles of the development of the self: differentiation (the results of the principal factor analysis) and integration (the results of the principal component analysis).
Keywords
self-awareness; self-consciousness; other-awareness
Hrčak ID:
3228
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2003.
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