title: Assessing personal initiative among vocational training students: development and validation of a new measure.
abstract: Personal initiative characterizes people who are proactive, persistent and self-starting when facing the difficulties that arise in achieving goals. Despite its importance in the educational field there is a scarcity of measures to assess students' personal initiative. Thus, the aim of the present study was to develop a questionnaire to assess this variable in the academic environment and to validate it for adolescents and young adults. The sample comprised 244 vocational training students. The questionnaire showed a factor structure including three factors (Proactivity-Prosocial behavior, Persistence and Self-Starting) with acceptable indices of internal consistency (ranging between α = .57 and α =.73) and good convergent validity with respect to the Self-Reported Initiative scale. Evidence of external validity was also obtained based on the relationships between personal initiative and variables such as self-efficacy, enterprising attitude, responsibility and control aspirations, conscientiousness, and academic achievement. The results indicate that this new measure is very useful for assessing personal initiative among vocational training students.
authors.affiliation: Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU (Spain).
authors.forename: Nekane
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Balluerka
authors.affiliation: Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU (Spain).
authors.forename: Arantxa
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gorostiaga
authors.affiliation: Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU (Spain).
authors.forename: Imanol
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Ulacia
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D020377:Self Efficacy; D012919:Social Behavior; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014829:Vocational Education; D055815:Young Adult