Construction of a homesickness-questionnaire: Preliminary results

This paper describes the first steps in the construction of a questionnaire to measure the vulnerability to develop homesickness. Based on a former study, comparing personality and behavioral characteristics of a group of soldiers suffering from homesickness (HS), a group with psychological problems of a different nature (PP) and a healthy controlgroup (HC), variables that differentiated best between the three groups were selected. This selection resulted in an 87-item questionnaire that was subsequently administered to three newly formed, but comparable groups of military conscripts. By means of a principal component analysis the 87-item questionnaire was reduced to a 29-item questionnaire, containing five subscales: Extraversion, Dominance, Rigidity, Homesickness experiences and Assertiveness. In general soldiers suffering from homesickness appear to be less extraverted, less dominant, more rigid, report more homesickness experiences and are less assertive than both controlgroups. In addition, a low level of dominance and assertiveness appeared to be characteristic of soldiers suffering from homesickness, both controlgroups scoring equally high on these variables. On the basis of the sumscores on these five scales the percentage of cases correctly classified was 74.4% (HS vs PP group) and 83.5% (HS group vs HC group), which implies a gain in parsimony relative to the former study. Given the possibility of population bias and the retrospective nature of the study results should be considered as preliminary.