Towards a comprehensive test specification for normative adolescent fears: a conservation of resources perspective

Abstract

Objective: This study assessed the extent to which the primary tenets of Conservation of Resources theory provide an adequate basis for categorising and conceptualising normative adolescent fears.

Method: Initial descriptive research, using data obtained from a sample of South African adolescents (n = 163), used systematic emergent content analysis to develop a test specification (i.e., content domains and manifestations of content domains) relevant to measures of normative adolescent fears, with subsequent a priori content analyses being used to explore the content validity of the test specification with respect to the item-content of selected normative childhood and adolescent fear schedules.

Results: Analyses suggest that content domains proposed by Conservation of Resources theory provide an adequate (exhaustive and mutually exclusive) basis for reliably conceptualising and categorising normative adolescent fears and for predicting the valence of specific adolescent fears.

Conclusions: A Conservation of Resources perspective was found to be of heuristic value in exploring content domains relevant to normative adolescent fears, and would appear to hold promise as a useful conceptual framework for future research in the field.