Development and Validation of Career Anxiety Scale for Adolescents with Hearing Impairment

Self-rating anxiety scales are universally used in general adult practice; even then, there is not any reliable and valid method for evaluating career anxiety in students with hearing impairment in national language. The current study describes the development and validation of Career Anxiety Scale for hearing impaired individuals. Initially, forty nine items were generated by using the deductive and inductive method of items generation. In the second Phase, experts' opinion and pilot testing were done. As a result, the number of items of the scale was reduced to thirty five. In the third phase, the scale was administered on the sample of 847 high school and college students to have psychometric analysis. The value of coefficient of alpha was .92, split half reliability was .80, parallel reliability was .92 and test-retest Reliability was .83. The scale was cross validated with the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale and Undergraduate Anxiety Scale for students. Results of data showed that the concurrent validity of scale was .259 and .314 respectively which were significantly correlated at the 0.01 level. In the third phase, item analysis was done, and all items were retained. Then exploratory factor analysis revealed seven factors of the scale. After the expert's opinion, five dimensions were selected for the scale. The results revealed that CASH has evidence for reasonable content validity, good internal consistency reliability, and adequate concurrent validity and will be helpful in finding hearing impaired students' career anxiety. Keywords. Career anxiety, self-rating scale, hearing impairment, reliability, validity