Development and Validation of the Grit Scale: Test of Measurement Invariance across University and High School Students

Development and Validation of the Grit Scale: Test of Measurement Invariance across University and High School Students Ferhat KARDAŞ1, Mustafa EŞKİSU2, Zekeriya ÇAM3, Metin TAYTAŞ4 1Faculty of Education, Van Yüzüzncü Yıl University, Van, Turkey 1Faculty of Education, Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University, Erzincan, Turkey X 1Faculty of Education, Muş Alparslan University, Muş, Turkey 1Faculty of Education, Van Yüzüzncü Yıl University, Van, Turkey ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article History Received 11.06.2021 Received in revised form 26.09.2021 Accepted 26.03.2022 Article Type:Research Article The concept of grit has becomea widely investigated topic in mental health and education in recent years. This study aims to develop a tool for measuring grit in high school and university students and to examine the measurement invariance of the developed scale on two different groups. A total of 586 high school students (411 female, 70%; 175 male, 30%) and 639 (437 female, 63%; 202 male, 37%) university students participated in the study. Grit Scale, Short Grit Scale, and Beck Hopelessness Scale were used as data collection tools in the study. The exploratory factor analysis results indicated that 14-item Grit Scale with three sub-dimensions explained 61.88% of the variance. The dimensions in the scale were named Perseverance, Commitment to Goals, and Consistency of Interest. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the three-dimensional structure of the Grit Scale fit the data well, with measurement invariance between the high school and university student groups. Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficients of the total score and sub-dimensions of the scale were found as .87, .85, .84, and .75, respectively. Convergent validity was evaluated by calculating the zero-order correlation between the Grit Scale and Short Grit Scale and a significantly high positive correlation was found (r= .655, p< .001). Divergent validity was evaluated by examining the relationship between Grit Scale and the Beck Hopelessness Scale and a mild correlation was found (r= -.484, p< .001). The study revealed that the Grit Scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool that can be used with adolescents and university students. © 2022 IJPES. All rights reserved Keywords: Grit, perseverance scale development, measurement ınvariance. 1. Introduction Psychology has always sought answers to the question of what makes people different from one another, what factors cause one person to be more successful than another who grows up in the same family, whether the differences between people are caused by genetic factors or by environmental factors in which individuals grow up.These questions have always had an important place in the field of education as well. When considering the features that predict success in educational processes, the effectiveness of effort and talent in these processes has always attracted the attention of researchers. This question has also been related to the issue of how much individuals can benefit from educational processes. Within this scope, these questions had an important effect on developing the first intelligence tests. In the history of psychology, many theories and 1Corresponding author’s address: Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Faculty of Education, Tuşba/Van/Turkey. e-mail: Citation: Kardaş, F., Eşkisu, M., Çam, Z. & Taytaş, M. (2022). Development and validation of the grit scale: Test of measurement ınvariance across university and high school students. International Journal of Psychology and Educational Studies, 9(3), 571-588. International Journal of Psychology and Educational Studies 2022, 9(3), 571-588 views have been put forward within the nature vs. nurture discussions, longitudinal studies have been conducted on identical twins, and many studies revealed scientific findings on the issue. However, over time, it has been observed that the emphasis on the effects of genetic factors has shifted to dimensions such as environmental factors, the richness of life experiences, and educational opportunities. One of the concepts that are widely emphasized on this subject is grit. American psychologist Angela Duckworth has sought answers to questions such as “Is effort or talent the most important determinant of the success of individuals? Why some people are more resilient in difficult educational processes, while others give up in a short time?” in her studies throughout the years and she came up with a theory regarding the concept of grit (Duckworth et al., 2007). Turkish Language Association (TDK, 2021) defines grit (azim) as "the determination to overcome the obstacles”. However, (Duckworth, 2016) added a new dimension to the concept after investigating the issue throughout the years by stating that the concept of grit should not be addressed only with the dimension of being determined and persistent in dealing with obstacles and difficulties. She defined grit as the determination of the individual in his efforts and the consistency of his interests. Thus, the concept of grit refers to perseverance and passion for long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007). In this context, grit is about being resilient in the face of adversities and difficulties of life, and at the same time, it is about having objectives and life goals that the individual will adhere to in the long term (Perkins-Gough, 2013). Hence, grit is the individual's commitment to long-term goals with persistence and passion. This passion expresses consistency over time rather than intense emotions (Duckworth et al., 2007). When the individual begins to enjoy his work, passion starts to emerge. According to this view, grit means pursuing high-level goals consistently for a long time. However, the individual's lack of well-structured goals may result in a lack of grit. Therefore, the individual needs to have a well-structured hierarchy of goals, and these goals must be interrelated and integrated (Duckworth, 2016). Analyzing grit within the framework of character strengths, Peterson and Seligman (2004), discussed the concept of grit as a feature of courage, which is one of the features of character strengths, and defined grit as the determination to continue one’s efforts voluntarily despite the obstacles, difficulties, and discouraging situations. Individuals who have grit as a positive personality trait have high expectations and complete hard work despite the obstacles and the urge to give up (Carr, 2013). The individual's desire to pursue their passions and dreams, believing in themselves, doing their best, working hard, thinking about the future, and giving up old habits are also characteristics evaluated within the framework of grit (Wedding, 2014). Grit means being resilient in the face of failure or negative experiences (Perkins-Gough, 2013). Grit is closely related to the concept of success, and grit in this process often predicts success more than talent because being talented in a certain subject causes an individual to make an effort only up to a certain point,. In this process, grit often predicts success more than talent because being talented in a certain subject causes an individual to make an effort only up to a certain point and then stop working upon reaching that threshold. On the contrary, gritty people do not stop working at a certain threshold because they have a permanent habit of working, and they keep working hard even after they achieve. They keep working hard even after achieving considerable success. On the other hand, the road to success is often long and every individual faces many obstacles and difficulties in this process, and from time to time they experiences some failures. Thus, individuals who achieve success in the long term are, above all, gritty individuals. For this reason, those who stop trying and working when faced with obstacles or who constantly change their interests have a lower chance of succeeding (Credé et al., 2017). Similarly, Duckworth (2016) argued that putting effort is twice as important as talent, and she talked about two significant characteristics of people who achieve superior success: they have extraordinary endurance and diligence, and they are well aware of what they want, and they act accordingly. She also defined these characteristics as the basic components of grit. According to this approach, focusing too much on talent involves some potential harm. In labeling and categorizing individuals according to their talents, there is a risk of overshadowing and discarding various traits of individuals, most importantly grit. Studies have shown that grit predicts success beyond and above talent (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). Various views have been put forward on the development of grit, and related questions have been asked about the concept, just like the discussions on personality. These questions were related to whether grit comes from birth, whether it is a personality trait, and whether it changes according to environmental conditions. Findings of studies show that grit is a trait that changes depending on environmental interventions, such as the individual's efforts and the amount of time spent on the task at hand (Alan et al., 2019; Cross, 2014). Grit, like 572 Ferhat KARDAŞ, Mustafa EŞKİSU, Zekeriya ÇAM & Metin TAYTAŞ all other personality traits, is affected by genetic factors. The Grit Scale was administered to 2000 twins in a study conducted in England. According to the results, the genetic transmission rate of the determination subscale of grit was calculated as 37%, and the genetic transmission rate of the passion scale was calculated as 20%. This situation revealed that the remaining part was explained by experience and showed that grit is a feature that could be developed (Duckworth, 2016). Peterson and Seligman (2004) dealt with the concept of grit within the framework of character strengths and indicated that grit is a trait that can be learned. Techniques such as rewarding individuals' efforts, teaching them to attribute their failures to insufficient efforts and giving them positive feedback in cases of learned helplessness contribute to the development of grit. Duckworth (2016) put forward four dimensions of the development of grit. The first is increasing interest and passion and enjoying what we do. The second one is to practice. Doing something better than the previous day, making it a part of one's nature by repeating it continuously, and demonstrating a long-term steady effort and determination for all these. The third is to have goals that mature the passion, make the individual move forward and sustain. To achieve this, it is significant that the individual sets the goals that serve the well-being of both himself and others. The fourth one is hope. According to this dimension, hope is a force necessary for every stage of grit that keeps the individual’s perseverance alive, uplifts them when they falls, and makes them move forward when they make a false step. Similarly, Tough (2012) stated that grit can be developed by education. Grit is a trait that can be developed by education by functional reinterpretation of various life experiences, and it significantly predicts the success levels of individuals. Diener et al. (2009) indicated that the ability of the individual to adapt to the situation when faced with obstacles and difficulties also plays an important role in building grit. Re-evaluating negative events with a positive perspective helps the individual to show grit and become perseverant in achieving their goals. It has been determined that the concept of grit has important consequences for individuals in various fields such as mental health and education. With the studies conducted by Duckworth (2016) and Peterson and Seligman (2004), the concept of grit has started to be considered one of the protective and developing factors in mental health. Several studies have shown that the concept of grit has a significant positive relationship with variables such as resilience (Jin & Kim, 2017), academic performance (Pate et al., 2017), life satisfaction, happiness, well-being, and positive emotions (Jin & Kim, 2017; Peterson et al., 2007; Singh, 2008). Studies also revealed that grit reduces the risk of suicidal ideation by developing meaning in life (Kleiman et al., 2013). The concept of grit has been considered as one of the variables closely related to academic success, it has been examined as one of the strong variables that predict success (Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014; Tang et al., 2019), and the concept of academic grit has been introduced in concerning this. The concept of academic grit is related to setting goals regarding the educational processes of individuals, overcoming the difficulties they encounter in the process of achieving these goals, and their determination and endurance in this process (Sağkal, 2020). Since the period during which first intelligence tests were developed in the field of education and psychology, cognitive variables such as intelligence have been predominantly used in predicting success, and non cognitive dimensions such as grit have been addressed in a more limited way. In this context, the relationship between the concept of grit as a non-cognitive variable success and performance has begun to be investigated extensively (Kannangara et al., 2018) with the introduction of virtues and character strengths that were discussed within the positive psychology approach and Duckworth et al.’s (2007) extensive research on the concept. The US Department of Education published a report in 2013, stating that skills such as grit, tenacity, and perseverance are important components of learning processes and success in the 21st century. These non cognitive skills are critical for individuals to achieve long-term and high-level goals and cope with the difficulties they face in school life and other areas of life. Within this scope, it has been suggested to all stakeholders of the educational field to create educational environments that allow the development of these traits of individuals (Shechtman, 2013). Thus, it can be said that the concept of grit is critically significant for the field of education. This situation, on the one hand, points out the importance of investigations on the subject and intervention studies aimed at developing grit, and it reveals that new tools need to be developed to measure the concept of grit. When the literature is examined, no other measurement tool for measuring grit has been found other than the Grit Scale developed by (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). Within this scope, the Grit Scale was used in most of the studies on the concept of grit that were conducted in different cultures. Although adaptation studies have been undertaken for this scale, the scale is a measurement tool developed in the individualist western culture. 573 International Journal of Psychology and Educational Studies 2022, 9(3), 571-588 In this context, it was noticed that a significant part of the research on grit was conducted in American culture (Tang et al., 2019). Traits such as grit are variables that are closely related to culture (Datu et al., 2016). On the one hand, this situation shows that the cultural adaptation studies of the existing measurement tools should be done carefully, on the other hand, it also points out the importance of developing cultural-sensitive measurement tools. Related studies in the literature reveal that while using a single measurement tool is beneficial in terms of comparison, this might put the studies, which investigate an important concept like grit, in a vicious circle after some time. On the other hand, recently, various opinions have been put forward regarding the predictive power, sub dimensions, and insufficiency of the measurement power of the Grit Scale (Datu et al., 2016; Tang, Wang, et al., 2021). One of the current debates about grit is the suggestion that studies on grit in adolescents are limited, most studies are conducted with university students, and that these groups should be diversified (Tang et al., 2019). In addition, various studies have shown that the dimension of commitment to goals has been neglected, or that the dimension of consistency of interest yielded different results in collectivist cultures, and suggestions have been made that different dimensions should be considered in measuring grit (Tang, Wang, et al., 2021). Based on these discussions, it is thought that the development of new measurement tools in different cultures and age groups will allow the emergence of different dimensions and orientations regarding the concept and in this way, this will contribute to the development of the literature on the topic with different perspectives. Although the Short Grit Scale was adapted to the Turkish language, it is thought that developing a new measurement tool for Turkish culture in the context of new and different discussions and suggestions would fill an important gap in the literature. It is seen that, in Turkey, the tools for measuring traits such as grit, tenacity, and perseverance are limited, and the existing measurement tools are the ones that have been developed and adapted in other cultures. Although the validity and reliability of the measurement tool are calculated by statistical methods in adaptation studies, it is thought that it is important to develop the measurement tool directly in the respective culture, rather than adaptation, especially in the measurement of some culture-sensitive personal traits. This situation will partially reduce the already existing limitation of self-report measurement tools and will reveal the desired feature to be measured in a more reliably. 2. Methodology 2.1.ResearchModel The research is a scale development study carried out with the general survey model.The scale development process was carried out within the framework of the steps that Worthington and Whittaker (2006) suggested as a result of their study based on an extensive literature review. 2.2. Research Sample Using the convenience sampling method, 586 (411 female, 70%; 175 male, 30%) high school students and 639 (437 female, 63%; 202 male, 32%) university students were recruited via classroom announcement in the present study. The range of age is from 14 to 19 (M= 16.01, SD= 1.27) for high school students and 18 to 32 (M= 21.37, SD= 2.37) for university students. The procedures and aims of the study were explained to each volunteer student before taking their written consent. Furthermore, the purposes and procedures of the study were approved the local ethical committee of the university. 2.3. Data Collection Tools and Procedure Short Grit Scale (Grit-S): The Grit-S is a 8-item self-report measure to evaluate trait level perseverance and passion for long-term goals (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). The Grit-S has two components: Consistency of Interest and Perseverance of Effort and a total score. Four items of Grit-S were reverse coded, and the higher scores represent higher grittiness. The Turkish form of Grit-S has the original factor structure (Sarıçam et al., 2016). Both subscales and total scores of Grit Scale have reasonable reliability in the present study; Cronbach’s alphas for consistency of interest, perseverance of effort, and total score were .63, .74, and .68, respectively. Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS): BHS, developed by Beck et al. (1974), is a 20-item true-false self-report measure that evaluates the individual's negative expectations for the future. Eleven of the items are keyed true and 9 false. The items are summed to obtain a total hopelessness score, ranging from 0-20. The higher scores demonstrate the higher level of hopelessness. The validity and reliability studies of BHS were conducted by 574 Ferhat KARDAŞ, Mustafa EŞKİSU, Zekeriya ÇAM & Metin TAYTAŞ Seber et al. (1993) and Durak and Palabıyıkoğlu (1994). In the current study, Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient of BHS was .86 Item Development Process: For the item development process, we carried out a comprehensive literature review on the topic of grit at the first stage. In this context, the studies and theoretical approaches put forward within the framework of the concepts of grit (Duckworth, 2016) and perseverance (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) were examined. As a result of this examination, we started to form an item pool for measuring this concept. Then, after taking the opinions of the field experts and conducting a pilot study with a total of 258 students, 112 of whom were high school students and 146 university students, we created a 27-item question pool. First, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on this pool of items. As a result of EFA analysis, the final scale form consisting of 14 items was obtained. The model was tested with the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) ant this analiysis was performed on two different groups of both high school and university students. As a result, it was revealed that the scale's goodness of fit index values were good and the scale's factor structure was confirmed. 2.4. Data Analysis SPSS 21 (IBM Corporation, 2015) and Mplus 7.3 (Muthén & Muthén, ) were used for the statistical analysis. Following the calculation of the socio-demographic characteristics of the sample, several additional statistical analysis were conducted; i) calculating skewness and kurtosis values, ii) corrected-item total correlation, iii) assessment of the construct validity of the Grit Scale by using explanatory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), iv) convergent and divergent validity performing the Pearson moment product correlation analysis the Grit Scale and relevant measures, and calculating average variance extracted and composite reliability, v) testing the reliability calculating the Cronbach’s alpha and retest reliability with a time interval of two weeks, vi) examining measurement invariance performing several multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Skewness and kurtosis values were less than ±1.2, which fell between Tabachnick and Fidell’s (2007) recommendation. The corrected-item total correlation coefficients of all the 27 items were greater than .30 (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). We randomly split the sample into two groups. In the first group (n=628), due to the principal component analysis (PCA) is a technique for reducing the dimensionality of the data (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007) and it is a psychometrically sound and less complex procedure, we performed a PCA on the 27 items to investigate the dimensional structure of the Grit Scale (Field, 2009). Considering that factors were expected to correlate each other, an oblique (Promax) rotation was performed (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007). Moreover, parallel analysis were run to determine the number of factors, using Horn’s(1965) procedure. Then, confirmatory factor analysis was performed using maximum likelihood estimation on the second group (n= 597). We used the following commonly used fit indices (Brown, 2015; Kline, 2011) and acceptable ranges to evaluate model fit (Hu & Bentler, 1999; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007): the CFI (≥ .90), the TLI (≥ .90) and the RMSEA (≤ .08) with a 90% CI. In addition, the composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE) and Cronbach’s alpha were calculate to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Grit Scale. To examine measurement invariance across the high school students and university students group, we performed several multi-group CFA to examine the Grit Scale's configural, metric and scalar invariance (Li et al., 2015; Vandenberg, 2002). First, as baseline models, the models were estimated freely for both high school and university students. Then, the configural invariance evaluated whether the Grit Scale was best described with three-latent factors for the two groups. Factor loadings were constrained to be equal across groups in the metric invariance. To examine scalar invariance, intercepts and factor loadings were set to be equal. To compare the increasingly nested models, chi-square difference test (p> .05) and recommended change in fit indices were used: ΔCFI ≤ .010; ΔTLI ≤ .010; ΔRMSEA ≤ .015 (Chen, 2007; Cheung & Rensvold, 2002). 2.5. Ethical The authors declare no conflict of interest. The participants were informed about the study, and the approvals for participation in the study were received. The compliance of the research process with ethical rules was ensured with the approval of the ethics committee obtained from the Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University ethics committee with the number E-.06.04-65991.