Development and Validation of a College Life Adaptation Scale for Chinese Students

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a scale for diagnosing the Chinese college students' adaptation to college life by identifying the exact concept and factors of college life adaptation. First of all, by analyzing the previous studies, this study defined the concept and sub factors of college life adaptation, and constituent items. Then delphi surveys with professionals were conducted twice, and 24 items for preliminary survey were extracted. After conducting preliminary survey, explanatory factor analysis was conducted to validate the items, and 4 factors with 22 items were confirmed. Through confirmatory factor analysis for main survey, final scale was confirmed after the convergent validity and discriminant validity were verified. The final scale which developed in this study consists of 4 sub factors and 22 items, including 6 items for ‘academic adaptation’, 6 items for ‘social adaptation’, 6 items for ‘personal-emotional adaptation’, and 4 items for ‘college environment adaptation’. The Cronbach α internal consistency reliability for sub-scales of measurement had a range between .856 and .875.