Escala das dimensões do desenvolvimento da identidade: Estudos psicométricos iniciais

This paper presents the development process and the initial psychometric studies of the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale (DIDS), an instrument for assessing identity development processes. The study involved 403 participants (ages ranging from 15 to 29 years) who answered the DIDS, the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and a questionnaire about socio-demographic information. We analyzed the psychometric properties of DIDS. We conducted a confirmatory factorial analysis to study the construct validity. Convergent and discriminant validity were analyzed through: the Average Variance Extracted (AVE); the comparison between the VEM values with the value of the correlation to square between the factors; and the correlations between the BSI and the identity processes. The Portuguese version of DIDS showed acceptable composite reliability, internal consistency, and the proposed factorial structure was confirmed. The results suggest that DIDS would be more reliable by increasing of the number of items in some factors and eliminating some existing items. However, DIDS is an instrument that can be used to measure identity development processes among Portuguese adolescents and emerging adults.