Developing a new scale to assess alexithymia-like features in Japanese youth: Investigation of the factor structure and psychometric properties

Abstract

Background: Studies on alexithymia have been primarily targeted at adult populations. Although some recent studies on alexithymia have focused on children and young adolescents, the literature is not entirely sufficient to develop an assessment tool. The aim of this study was to develop a new scale to measure alexithymia-like features in young adolescents and to evaluate its psychometric properties. Methods: A total of 1,444 Japanese junior high school students (701 males, 743 females, aged 12-15, mean age = 13.37 years, SD = 0.98) participated in two surveys conducted at their own schools. Results: First, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with the first survey data (n=981) demonstrated that this new scale had a unifactor structure as a result of the MAP analysis and parallel analysis. Second, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with the second survey data (n=463) also verified the unifactor structure of this new scale with acceptable goodness of model fit. The new scale also demonstrated modest internal consistency. Conclusions: As the correlations between this new alexithymia scale and the related variables were significantly small in accordance with our hypothesis, we could demonstrate that this new scale had acceptable reliability and construct validity and could be useful for measuring alexithymic tendency in young adolescents.