Asuman Yüksel and Nagihan Oğuz Duran
Assist.Prof.Dr. Uludağ University Faculty of Education.
Problem Statement: Although the study of gratitude in psychology has a very short history, the findings of several studies underline the role of gratitude in enhancing individual well-being. Therefore, it is important to be able to assess levels of individual gratitude in counseling and research settings. Since, in the Turkish literature, no measure of gratitude has been validated for college students, it is important to adapt The Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ), one of the most commonly used self-report measures of dispositional gratitude in recent literature, into Turkish, for use in research and practice.
Purpose of Study: The purpose of this study was to translate the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ; McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002) into Turkish and investigate its validity and reliability among Turkish undergraduate students.
Methods: Forward and back translation methods were used to translate the GQ from English to Turkish. The Turkish form of the GQ, along with optimism, positive and negative affect, and satisfaction with life measures, was administered to a total of 859 Turkish college students (For age M=20.23, SD= 1.77) who were recruited from all departments at the Faculty of Education, Uludağ University. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to examine the factor structure of the scale. The relationship between GQ scores and scores on other measures was oefficient. Additionally, internal consistency was evaluated by calculating Cronbach’s alpha, and item-total correlation and test-retest reliability coefficients were calculated by Pearson correlation.
Findings and Results: Regarding construct validity, the scale was unidimensional. However, a five-item model, rather than the original sixitem version, fit the sample of Turkish college students better [GFI=0.97, CFI= .94, AGFI=0.90, SRMR = 0.04, RMSEA=0.10]. The findings also indicated sufficient evidence in favor of the concurrent validity and reliability of the Turkish GQ.
Conclusions and Recommendations: The results of this study revealed that the five-item GQ can be used to evaluate prepositional gratitude among Turkish college students.
Key words: Gratitude, validity, reliability, college students