Development of the Cultural Tightness-Looseness Orientation Scale for College Students

Abstract

Background

“The cultural tightness-looseness orientation of college students”, which involves college students’ cognition about tolerance for non-learning-behavior in class, strength of learning-behavior norms in class, and strength of social norms in the generalized macro-context, offers a new perspective to explain college students’ psychology and behavior and could effectively promote their all-round development. However, there is severely lack of a reliable and valid instrument. Hence, we seek to develop the Cultural Tightness-Looseness Orientation Scale for College Students (CTLOS-S) in the Chinese context.

Methods

We firstly pooled the initial 17 measuring items of CTLOS-S through literature review and the open-ended interview. After conducting questionnaire survey among 264 college students using the initial scale, we did a series of reliability and validity tests to get the formal CTLOS-S, based on which we further administered questionnaire survey among 755 college students to check its reliability, construct validity, criterion validity, content validity, and across-gender invariance.

Results

The formal CTLOS-S contains 7-item subscale of tolerance orientation for non-learning-behavior in class, 4-item subscale of strength orientation of learning-behavior norms in class, and 3-item subscale of strength orientation of social norms in the generalized macro-context. The testing results of the second-stage questionnaire survey data (N = 755) demonstrate that the reliability coefficients of CTLOS-S and its three subscales are 0.85, 0.85, 0.83, and 0.76 separately, the internal 3-factor structure validity of CTLOS-S is satisfactorily acceptable with χ²(74) = 318.76, CFI = 0.94, TLI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.06, and SRMR = 0.04, and the content validity and criterion validity are satisfactory as the total score of CTLOS-S is positively correlated with each score of its three subscales and the total score of learning engagement scale. Besides, the 3-factor structure of CTLOS-S is invariant across gender.

Conclusion

The 14-item CTLOS-S we develop is a reliable and valid instrument for researchers to conduct quantitative studies on college students’ cultural tightness-looseness orientation.

Keywords:

• the cultural tightness-looseness orientation of college students
• tolerance orientation for non-learning-behavior in class
• strength orientation of learning-behavior norms in class
• strength orientation of social norms in the generalized macro-context

Ethical Statement

Our study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xuzhou University of Technology. All procedures involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards with written informed consent from all subjects.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Philosophy and Social Science Research Project in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (the grant No. 2022SJYB1164), Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Normal University (the grant No. 2022XKT0825), and Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program for College Students of Jiangsu Normal University (the grant No. XSJCX12144).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.