Technical Overview

The development of the WPDI adopted theories of youth development, psychological and sociocultural perspectives and involved a series of empirical studies over years. All participants were voluntary but incentives were incorporated in most of the studies to enhance the response rate. Students participating in the studies were local full-time undergraduate students from public universities in Hong Kong.

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Reliability of WPDI in the Follow-up Study 2013 (N=1942)

Domain	Cronbach's Alpha
Intellectual Intellectual Capacity	.91
Physical Health Maintenance Physical Fitness	.85 .93
Professional Career Preparation Leadership	.87 .90
Psychological Emotional Health Self Appreciation	.89 .89
Social Civic Responsibility Community Care Cultural Engagement Family Relationship Peer Relationship	.90 .89 .93 .94 .88
Spiritual Art Appreciation Moral Commitment Spiritual Quest	.89 .83 .79

Cronbach’s alpha reflects the degree of the internal consistency of the items. The WPDI shows good internal consistency reliability across various studies, the Cronbach’s alphas ranged from .79 to .94 in a study conducted in 2013.

Content validity and face validity were examined in focus groups and individual interviews conducted from 2009 to 2011; convergent and discriminant validities, and concurrent validity were examined in the main study 2011. The validation results were found to be satisfactory.

For convergent validity, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) was used to test the convergent validity of WPDI Self Appreciation. Pearson correlation between Rosenberg and WPDI Self Appreciation was .83 (p<.001). Depression Anxiety & Stress Scale (DASS) (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) and Chinese Positive Youth Development Scale –Emotional Competence (Shek, Siu & Lee, 2007) were used to test the validity of WPDI Emotional Health. Pearson correlation between DASS and WPDI Emotional Health was -.65 (p<.001) and correlations between PYDS-Emotional Competence and WPDI Emotional Health was .50 (p<.001).

Chinese Positive Youth Development Scale (Shek, Siu & Lee, 2007) – Bonding and Moral Competence were used to converge the validity of WPDI Family Relationship, Peer Relationship, and Moral Commitment, the correlations were .71, .69, and .62 respectively. All coefficients were significant at the .001 level.

The Chinese Spirituality Scale – Disorientation (Ng, Yau, Chan, Chan & Ho, 2005) was used to test WPDI Spiritual Quest and the correlation was .48 (p<.001). Global Perspective Inventory – Social Responsibility Scale (Braskamp, Braskamp. Merrill, & Engberg, 2010) was used to test convergent validity of WPDI Community Care and the correlation was .73 (p<.001). Again, this scale was found to be significantly correlated with WPDI Leadership with a Pearson correlation coefficient of .48 (p<.001) and WPDI Civic Responsibility with a Pearson correlation coefficient of .45 (p<.001).

For discriminant validity, the socially desirable response set (Hay, Hayashi, & Steward, 1989) was used to examine the discriminant validity of WPDI. The coefficients were significant and weak, ranging from .09 to .20, except Peer Relationship (r=.23), Moral Commitment (r=.25) and Spiritual Quest (r=.21). As to concurrent validity, the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) was used and the correlations between the WPDI factors and satisfaction with life were significant.

For further details of WPDI psychometric properties, please refer to the following publication:

Ng, P., Su, X., Lai, G., Chan, D., Ho, E., Chan, V., Leung, H., Kwan, V., & Li, C. (2016). A holistic model of student development: The validation of Whole Person Development Inventory for college students in Hong Kong. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 0748175615625748.

WPDI Hong Kong Norm

Seven UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong, including Hong Kong Baptist University, City University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, participated in this normative data collection. The norm had 8327 local Chinese students who were studying in full-time UGC funded undergraduate programmes. There were 5153 female (61.9%) and 3174 male (38.1%) students. The age ranged from 17 to 25 years old with a mean of 20.71 and standard deviation of 1.6. The sample was weighted by institute population size and gender proportion in the whole population.

WPDI Northern Taiwan Norm

The study on WPDI Taipei norm was funded by United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia – Small Grant Program. Four universities accepted the invitation, including Soochow University and National Taiwan Normal University located in Taipei City and Fu Jen Catholic University and National Taipei University in New Taipei City. Two were public and the other two were private universities. The WPDI norm for northern part of Taiwan (Taipei Norm) was consisted of 1251 local Taiwan students, with 68.6% female and 31.4% male. The age ranged from 17 to 25 years old with a mean of 20.97 and a standard deviation of 1.33. The sample was weighted by undergraduate population, proportions of gender and type of university.