Reliability, Validity, and Cultural Adaptation of the Multidimensional Scale of Life Skills in Late Childhood with Upper Primary School Students in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Authors

  • Jean-Francois Trani Brown School of Social Work, Public Health, and Social Policy, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
  • Alex L. Greenfeld Brown School of Social Work, Public Health, and Social Policy, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
  • Parul Bakhshi Program in Occupational Therapy, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, USA
  • Ian Kaplan Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, Kabul, Afghanistan
  • Parween Azimi Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, Kabul, Afghanistan
  • Meena Safi National Rural Support Program, Jinnah Avenue, Blue Area, Islamabad, Pakistan
  • Ganesh M. Babulal Department of Neurology and Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v8i1p37

Keywords:

Afghanistan, Children Life Skills, Cultural Adaptation, Pakistan, Psychometric Properties, Scale Validation

Abstract

Life skills, also known as psychosocial and non-cognitive skills, are critical to children’s development and well-being as they progress through early life courses but difficult to measure. The present study aims at validating a culturally adapted version of the Multidimensional Scale of Life Skills in Late Childhood in the context of primary school of rural Afghanistan and Pakistan. The instrument was face validated by six of the authors. The scale was found accessible to students’ grades three to five despite its original target of late childhood. Content validation was also carried out by the authors to evaluate the representativeness of the scale items for the various dimensions of life skills. The items were found relevant for the seven dimensions of life skills considered. The scale also showed overall good internal consistency, acceptable test retest and inter rate consistence and high responsiveness. Exploratory factorial analysis showed that 4 and 3 factors explained 40% and 37% of the total variance respectively in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

References

Almlund, M., A. L. Duckworth, J. Heckman and T. Kautz (2011). Personality psychology and economics. Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, 4, 1-181.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development, Sage.

Cunha, F., & Heckman, J.J. (2008). Formulating, identifying and estimating the technology of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. Journal of Human Resources, 43(4), 738-782.

Dee, T. S., & M. R. West, M.R. (2011). The non-cognitive returns to class size. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 33(1), 23-46.

DeVellis, R. F. (2012). Scale development: Theory and applications Thousand Oaks, Sage.

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R.P., Dymnicki, A.B., Taylor, R.D., & Schellinger, K.B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405-432.

Evans, G. W., & Rosenbaum, J. (2008). Self-regulation and the income-achievement gap. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(4), 504-514.

Haynes, S. N., Richard, D., & Kubany, E.S. (1995). Content validity in psychological assessment: A functional approach to concepts and methods. Psychological Assessment, 7(3), 238.

Heckman, J. J., & Kautz, T. (2014). Fostering and measuring skills: Interventions that improve character and cognition. The myth of achievement tests: The GED and the role of character in American life J. J. Heckman, J. E. Humphries, and T. Kautz. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 341-430.

John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. Handbook of personality: Theory and research. L. A. Pervin and O. P. John. New York, Guilford Press: 102-138.

Kennedy, F., Pearson, D., Brett-Taylor, L., & Talreja, V. (2014). The life skills assessment scale: Measuring life skills of disadvantaged children in the developing world. Social Behavior and Personality, 42(2), 197-209.

Kobayashi, M., Gushiken, T., Ganaha, Y., Sasazawa, Y., Iwata, S., Takemura, A., Fujita, T., Asikin, Y., & Takakura, M. (2013). Reliability and validity of the multidimensional scale of life skills in late childhood. Education Sciences, 3(2), 121-135.

Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R.J., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B.W., & Ross, S. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693-2698.

Prajapati, R., Sharma, B., & Sharma, D. (2017). Significance of life skills education. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (CIER), 10(1), 1-6.

Rubio, D. M., Berg-Weger, M., Tebb, S.S., Lee, E.S., & Rauch, S. (2003). Objectifying content validity: Conducting a content validity study in social work research. Social Work Research, 27(2), 94-104.

Subasree, R., & Radhakrishnan Nair, A. (2014). The life skills assessment scale: The construction and validation of a new comprehensive scale for measuring Life Skills. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR-JHSS), 19(1), 50-58.

Terwee, C. B., Bot, S.D., de Boer, M.R., van der Windt, D.A., Knol, D.L., Dekker, J., Bouter, L.M., & de Vet, H.C. (2007). Quality criteria were proposed for measurement properties of health status questionnaires. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 60(1), 34-42.

Tough, P. (2012). How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Trani, J., Bakhshi, P., Mozaffari, A., Sohail, M., Rawab, H., Kaplan, I., Ballard, E., & Hovmand, P. (2019). Strengthening child inclusion in the classroom in rural schools of Pakistan and Afghanistan: What did we learn by testing the System Dynamics protocol for community engagement? Research in Comparative and International Education, 14(1), 158-181.

Tsukayama, E., Duckworth, A.L., & Kim, B. (2013). Domain-specific impulsivity in school-age children. Developmental Science, 16(6), 879-893.

UNESCO (2000). The Dakar Framework for Action: Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments: Including Six Regional Frameworks for Action. Paris, UNESCO.

UNESCO (2012). Youth and skills: putting education to work. Education for All. Paris, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

UNESCO (2015). Education for All 2000–2015: Achievements and Challenges. Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges. Paris,

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: 516.

UNESCO (2020). Inclusion and education: All mean all. Global education monitoring report. UNESCO. Paris, UNESCO.

West, M. R., Kraft, M.A., Finn, A.S., Martin, R.E., Duckworth, A.L., Gabrieli, C.F., & Gabrieli, J.D. (2016). Promise and paradox: Measuring students’ non-cognitive skills and the impact of schooling. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(1), 148-170.

World Health Organisation (1999). Partners in Life Skills Education: Conclusions from a United Nations Inter-Agency Meeting. W. H. Organisation. Geneva, World Health Organisation: 17.

Downloads

Published

01.03.2021

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Trani, J.-F., Greenfeld, A. L., Bakhshi, P., Kaplan, I., Azimi, P., Safi, M., & Babulal, G. M. (2021). Reliability, Validity, and Cultural Adaptation of the Multidimensional Scale of Life Skills in Late Childhood with Upper Primary School Students in Afghanistan and Pakistan. International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies, 8(1), 35-80. https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v8i1p37

Similar Articles

1-10 of 259

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.