Development and Validation of Pro-Social Behavior Assessment Scale (PBAS) for Children with Developmental Psychopathologies

Abstract

Pro-social behaviors are those behaviors that create a sense of harmony and compassion among people. These are the behaviors that promote the “social-good” in a society. The children with developmental psychopathologies are ignored for their positive attributes and more attention is focused on their undesirable behaviors and hence the larger body of assessment of children with developmental psychopathologies deals with their undesirable behaviors. This paper presents the systematic development of an indigenous measure to assess pro-social behavior in children with developmental pathologies. Initially 67 items were gathered from an item pool which was generated though semi-structured interviews from experts which were then validated by experts for their significance and relevance to the construct. Total 37 items with the highest endorsement rates were retained for the scale and it was then administered on 148 children with Intellectual Deficiency 5 to 17 years (M = 11.56, SD = 3.04). Factor analysis revealed four factors contributing to Pro-social behaviors namely; Social Competence, Initiative Taking, Task Adherence and Selflessness. Results are discussed in terms of factors in indigenous scenario and the psychometric properties of the scale.