RESEARCH ARTICLE


Chinese Family Influence on Adolescent Volunteerism Scale: Scale Construction and Some Pioneering Findings in Hong Kong§



Ben M.F. Law*, 1, Daniel T.L. Shek2, 3
1 Social Welfare Practice and Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
2 Centre for Quality of Life, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
3 Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau, Macau

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2009
Volume: 2
First Page: 1
Last Page: 8
Publisher Id: TOFAMSJ-2-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874922400902010001

Article History:

Received Date: 22/12/2008
Revision Received Date: 2/1/2009
Acceptance Date: 5/1/2009
Electronic publication date: 30/1/2009
Collection year: 2009

© 2009 Law and Shek;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Social Work,The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong; E-mail: danielshek@cuhk.edu.hk
§ The paper is part of the Ph.D. thesis of the first author under the supervi-sion of the second author.


Abstract

The development of an instrument that measures family influence to adolescent volunteerism is reported. The Chinese Family Influence on Adolescent Volunteerism Scale (C-FIAV) was constructed. Content validity, cultural relevance, and reading level of the measure were reviewed by adolescents and a panel of experts. The scale was then administered to a sample of 5,946 junior and senior high school students. Exploratory factor analyses revealed a 2-factor structure, namely positive family influence and extrinsic family influence. Reliability analyses showed that the related measures were internally consistent. The sub-scale scores for volunteers and non-volunteers were different, indicating criterionrelated validity. The score was also associated with another measurement on self-ranked importance of family, indicating construct validity. Generally speaking, grade effect was more significant than gender effect for the C-FIAV and sub-scale scores. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Keywords: Adolescent volunteerism, family influence, Chinese, validation, measurement.