Vocational Psychology

OBJECTIVES: This study is aimed to explore the influence of higher vocational college students' lifestyle and mental health on weight change in Fuzhou during COVID-19. METHODS: This study adopted the cross-sectional study method and a total of 1426 students (1111 women and 315 men) were recruited from higher vocational college in Fuzhou. The questionnaire mainly included six dimensions: demographic characteristics, anthropometric measurements, dietary habits, physical activity, sleep quality and psychological status...

AIM: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire self-report (SDQ-SR) is a valid instrument for detection of emotional and behavioral problems. The aim of this study was to compare the psychometric properties of the SDQ-SR for low and higher educated adolescents, and to explore its suitability. METHODS: We included 426 adolescents. We compared internal consistency for low-educated, i.e., at maximum pre-vocational secondary education, and higher educated adolescents and assessed whether the five-factor structure of the SDQ holds across educational levels...

Engagement in services is a core element to successful outcomes for service users and programs. In coordinated specialty care (CSC) programs, designed for individuals experiencing first-episode psychosis, engagement has only been measured programmatically and not by service component. This qualitative study sought to explore provider perspectives on service user engagement in service components of CSC. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 20 service providers from five community-based early intervention programs for psychosis in the United States...

Vocational psychologists have called for greater attention to different forms of capital, any resource or asset that confers profit and power, to better understand the vocational development process, particularly for those who lack resources and power. However, previous research has had several conceptual and measurement limitations, such as the use of less inclusive frameworks; a focus on more privileged populations; and the overuse of categorical, dummy coded, and objective measures. To address these limitations, the present study aimed to (a) develop an inclusive, subjective, continuous, and multidimensional work capital scale and (b) validate the new scale with representative samples of working adults and job seekers across two studies...

INTRODUCTION: The competency of education is advocated in the 2023 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. UNESCO encourages countries to provide inclusive, equitable, competency education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Starting from 2019, 12-Year-Basic-Education, a new curriculum, was fully implemented in Taiwan to conform to the competency education strategy. For the teachers on site, teachers' understanding of the new curriculum and teaching practice has a direct impact on the competency of the implementation of this new policy...

Secondary school students are at risk for mental health problems, especially nowadays, when we face an increase in mental health issues among adolescents and the general population. Mental health literacy (MHL) and help-seeking behavior are considered protective factors; however, we lack data on the levels of MHL in secondary school students and how MHL is developed in schools. This correlational and comparative study was designed to investigate mental health literacy (MHL) and help-seeking behavior among secondary school students in Slovakia...

PURPOSE: Perceived discrimination among higher vocational college students is a prevalent issue in China and is linked to various mental and behavioral problems, including mobile phone addiction. Yet, the mechanisms underlying the relationship between perceived discrimination and mobile phone addiction remain ambiguous. METHODS: To address this issue, we recruited 1253 higher vocational college students to elucidate the relationship between perceived discrimination and mobile phone addiction...

Vocational interests have been an important concept for career decision making and counseling. However, while researchers have separately explored the criterion validity of interest congruence and the formation mechanism of interests, there has been little joint, interactive consideration of the two key aspects of interests. A key issue remains unclear: Could interests with different focal formation mechanisms have different consequences? Drawing on the motivation and vocational literature, this article first explains why it is possible and necessary to differentiate the formation mechanisms of interests in terms of motivational focus (intrinsic, extrinsic-autonomous, and extrinsic-controlled)...

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/8625830.].

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/8274445.].

CONTEXT: Individuals must change the way they perform activities in response to chronic pain. In the literature, three activity patterns are commonly described: avoidance, pacing, and persistence. Many studies have explored these activity patterns. However, little research has delved into the factors that lead people to adopt a particular activity behaviour. This study aimed to explore the relationship that people with chronic musculoskeletal pain have with activity and highlight the factors underlying their practices...

AIMS: Psychosocial rehabilitation (PSR) is at the core of psychiatric recovery. There is a paucity of evidence regarding how the needs and characteristics of patients guide clinical decisions to refer to PSR interventions. Here, we used explainable machine learning methods to determine how socio-demographic and clinical characteristics contribute to initial referrals to PSR interventions in patients with serious mental illness. METHODS: Data were extracted from the French network of rehabilitation centres, REHABase, collected between years 2016 and 2022 and analysed between February and September 2022...

Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been applied in short-scale construction and model specification search. In the present study, we propose a bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underlying a psychological measurement instrument. The algorithm assigns items to an unknown number of nested factors in a confirmatory bifactor model, while simultaneously selecting items for the final scale...

Extreme response style (ERS), the tendency of participants to select extreme item categories regardless of the item content, has frequently been found to decrease the validity of Likert-type questionnaire results. For this reason, various item response theory (IRT) models have been proposed to model ERS and correct for it. Comparisons of these models are however rare in the literature, especially in the context of cross-cultural comparisons, where ERS is even more relevant due to cultural differences between groups...

Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) are often used in psychological research when developing measurement models for psychological constructs. Evaluating CFA model fit can be quite challenging, as tests for exact model fit may focus on negligible deviances, while fit indices cannot be interpreted absolutely without specifying thresholds or cutoffs. In this study, we review how model fit in CFA is evaluated in psychological research using fit indices and compare the reported values with established cutoff rules...

Coefficient omega indices are model-based composite reliability estimates that have become increasingly popular. A coefficient omega index estimates how reliably an observed composite score measures a target construct as represented by a factor in a factor-analysis model; as such, the accuracy of omega estimates is likely to depend on correct model specification. The current paper presents a simulation study to investigate the performance of omega-unidimensional (based on the parameters of a one-factor model) and omega-hierarchical (based on a bifactor model) under correct and incorrect model misspecification for high and low reliability composites and different scale lengths...

Words read correctly per minute (WCPM) is the reporting score metric in oral reading fluency (ORF) assessments, which is popularly utilized as part of curriculum-based measurements to screen at-risk readers and to monitor progress of students who receive interventions. Just like other types of assessments with multiple forms, equating would be necessary when WCPM scores are obtained from multiple ORF passages to be compared both between and within students. This article proposes a model-based approach for equating WCPM scores...

Short-form development is an important topic in psychometric research, which requires researchers to face methodological choices at different steps. The statistical techniques traditionally used for shortening tests, which belong to the so-called exploratory model, make assumptions not always verified in psychological data. This article proposes a machine learning-based autonomous procedure for short-form development that combines explanatory and predictive techniques in an integrative approach. The study investigates the item-selection performance of two autoencoders: a particular type of artificial neural network that is comparable to principal component analysis...

A recurring question regarding Likert items is whether the discrete steps that this response format allows represent constant increments along the underlying continuum. This question appears unsolvable because Likert responses carry no direct information to this effect. Yet, any item administered in Likert format can identically be administered with a continuous response format such as a visual analog scale (VAS) in which respondents mark a position along a continuous line. Then, the operating characteristics of the item would manifest under both VAS and Likert formats, although perhaps differently as captured by the continuous response model (CRM) and the graded response model (GRM) in item response theory...

Multiple imputation (MI) is one of the recommended techniques for handling missing data in ordinal factor analysis models. However, methods for computing MI-based fit indices under ordinal factor analysis models have yet to be developed. In this short note, we introduced the methods of using the standardized root mean squared residual (SRMR) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) to assess the fit of ordinal factor analysis models with multiply imputed data. Specifically, we described the procedure for computing the MI-based sample estimates and constructing the confidence intervals...