COUV ACTES - Psychologie communautaire

Community Psychology: Common Values, Diverse PracticesPsycho-physical risk and rasch model applicationby Gioacchino Lavanco 1 , Monica Mandalà 2 , Fabio Aiello 3 ,Floriana Romano 4 & Valentina Vaccaro 2BackgroundPRAI (Physical Risk Assessment Inventory) is a questionnaire used to measure the psychophysical riskperception; it was developed by "Danger Assessment Questionnaire”, and it's composed of 27 items with 7-pointLikert (0 = "no physical risk", 6 = "extreme physical risk"). It's composed by two scales: "Health Risk" and "SportRisk". The questionnaire has been administered to a sample of 551 adolescents attending the first and fifth yearof high school of Palermo. A factor analysis has been conducted to investigate latent structure of PRAI, in orderto identify responses' latent dimensions. Factor analysis has been conducted separately for males and femalesand it produced two scales ("Health Risk" and "Sport Risk"), formed respectively by 11 and 15-item, with a quitesimilar composition. It's possible to consider two disjoint dimensions of risk perception, regardless of gender. Toachieve our goals we used the Rasch model, depending on the category of multiple-choice questions (sevenpoints) in the questionnaire. The RM can be drawn as an indication of the perceived risk by the subjects and therisk associated with a particular activity and it permits to place two measures on a common quantitative scaleobtaining two sets of estimates: one of subjects PLP and one other of ILP items.Factor analysis revealed the multidimensionality of the risk perception by the presence of two subscales: Healthand Sport Risk. The main objective of this study was to achieve one-dimensional measure of the individualsubscales.AimsTo verify the one-dimensionality of the scales M and F.To verify if male and female are different about risk perception: as suggested by the literature, women have levelsof perceived risk higher than men, while those with higher levels of education and higher incomes tend tominimize the risk activities.To verify if any person factor (PF) affects risk perception (DIF).Data analysis and ResultsTo achieve our objectives several levels of analysis have been used:1Full Professor of Community Psychology, University of Palermo2Community psychologist3Fellow Professor, University of Enna-Kore4Ph.D of Community Psychology, University of Palermo342