2016 Volume 19 Issue 1 Pages 91-98
[Purpose]
An intervention based on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) was implemented in a children’s environment to increase the rate of positive reinforcement and children acting voluntarily. The construct of mental energy indicated by Kanno (1987) seems to relate to the purpose of ABA, but there is still room to examine mental energy via the statistical method. This study implemented abduction on the range of mental energy as a pilot study for arranging the construct.
[Methods]
Three elementary school students and two university students were interviewed individually about events in which they make a difference. Next, three graduate students and a professor created items from the interview data. Of the elementary students, 11 evaluated the feelings categories, “had sense of accomplishment,” “felt happy,” and “felt at ease,” on a two-point scale.
[Results]
Cluster analysis revealed three clusters.
[Discussion]
In this study, “sense of security,” which includes the construct of mental energy, was not extracted. Two hypotheses for the reason are: First, “sense of security” overlaps with other constructs “pleasant experience” and “accepted experience.” Second, because of a too-small sample size, “sense of security” was not extracted. Thus, examining these two hypotheses is necessary.
