A Study on the Development and Validation of Scale of CSFT(College Student of Failure Tolerance): Structural relationship of Failure Tolerance, Grit and Academic amotivation

Abstract

Objectives The study aimed to develop and validate the scale of ‘the college student of failure tolerance (CSFT)’ to understand the failure tolerance of college students. Methods The interviews were conducted with college students. Six stories were extracted from previous studies and interviews and two questions for each story. After preliminary test, an survey of 10 questions was administered to the 818 college students along with the Grit and Academic amotivation scales. The exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to verify construct validity, and and correlation analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the relationships with the criterion scales in verifying concurrent validity. The mediating effect in the causal relationship was analyzed by applying the bootstrapping method 2,000 times with a 95% confidence interval. To analyze reliability, Cronbach’s α coefficient was calculated. Results The exploratory factor analysis indicated that those five areas (Grade management, Aptitude for major, Self-management, independency, Career preparation) were contracted to two factors (‘Analysis of the cause of failure’ and ‘Belief in overcoming failure’). Confirmatory factor analysis, using structural equation modeling, confirmed that the factor structure of CSFT fits to the data. In order to examine the criterion validity of CSFT, the causal model of ‘Analysis of the cause of failure’ and ‘Belief in overcoming failure’, ‘Grit’, and ‘Academic amotivation’ was analyzed using structural equation modeling. As a result, it was confirmed that the higher the ‘Failure tolerance’, the higher the ‘Grit’, but the lower the ‘Academic amotivation’. Additionally it was found that ‘Belief in overcoming failure’ played a role as a mediating variable between ‘Analysis of the cause of failure’ and ‘Grit’, and between ‘Analysis of the cause of failure’ and ‘Academic amotivation’. The reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s α) of the CSFT were satisfactory, ranging from .75 to .79. Conclusions Based on these findings, the importance of measuring the college students’ failure tolerance and its implications were discussed.