Development and validation of an Academic Involution Scale for College Students in China

Abstract

The term “nei juan” (in English “involution”) has become a buzzword in recent Chinese tertiary educational contexts, denoting the intense competition and anxiety among Chinese college students. This project aims to develop a reliable and valid scale measuring Chinese college students' competitive psychology, that is, an Academic Involution Scale for College Students in China (AISCSC). To this end, the scale was administered online to 1015 Chinese college students from a university from the Northern China. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a determination of three factors (i.e., academic behavior, social activity, and social relationship) with a strong psychometric basis. The correlations between students' academic anxiety and their involutional behavior further confirmed the concurrent validity of AISCSC.