Validating Instruments Applied In Studying the: Relationship between Religious Commitment, Peer Relations and Behaviour of Adolescents Implications for School Counselling

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to validate the three instruments applied in studying the relationship between Religious Commitment, Peer Relations and Behavior of secondary school adolescents (Mwita, 2010). The greatest challenge in understanding the behavior of people is the adequate measurement of abstract construct (Hinkin, 1989). Thus confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, and factors derived from all the three instruments were then explored by orthogonal rotations. Three factors were extracted from the behavior items, two from the peer relations items and two from the religious commitment items. Reliability scores between the constructs indicated statistically significant difference on the latent factors of all the three instruments. Constructs were further validated by determining Average Variance Extracted (AVE) where high scores of AVE (between 0.8 & 0.9) and high factor scores of ?.4 (Hair et al., 2010) were obtained. Finally, constructs were validated by applying SEM which proved the validity of all the constructs by obtaining good fit indices.