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Delinquency is an anti social behavior that varies from time to time, place to place and culture to culture etc. The present paper describes the construction and standardization of a measure of delinquency proneness scale for adolescents. The items were constructed on the basis of behavior of adolescents towards parents, friends, teachers etc. The final draft of 50 items was passed through the procedure of expert checking, try out and final try out. The tool has face validity as well as content validity and test-retest reliability.

The investigator has constructed a scale to measure delinquency proneness scale for adolescents. By administering it educators, parents and other social agencies can measure proneness towards delinquency in time and can help the adolescents in overcoming their behavioural problems in time.

Kvaraceous and Miller have reported that “Behaviour by teenagers which violates norms of a particular social institution with sufficient frequency and /or seriousness so as to provide a firm basis for legal action against the behavior of individual or group is known as delinquent behavior.”

Burt remarked that, “a child is said to be regarded as a delinquent, when his anti-social tendencies appear so grave that he becomes or ought to become the subject of official action.” Delinquency is a relative concept. It changes with the time and place. There is wide coverage of anti social behavior that varies from time to time, place to place and culture to culture etc.

Target Population- This scale is developed for students of +1 class of age between 14-17 years.

Types of Test items- This scale is developed on five point likert scale. Five point rating scale includes a continuum of alternative responses is expressed in terms of always, often, sometimes, rarely and never.

Preparation of the items

An important step in the development of the tool is the preparation of preliminary draft. The investigator framed sixty one items of the tool on the basis of information gathered from experts, existing tools and the study of relevant literature from books, journals and internet sources etc. The statements were discussed with the supervisor and modifications were made. The preliminary draft of 61 items was presented to eight experts to review the items critically and objectively After thorough discussion with experts, items were reviewed, criticized and revised Twenty items were reframed and three items were discarded as per the comments and judgments of the experts.

Preliminary Try Out of the Scale

The investigator administered preliminary draft to a sample of 20 students to find out language difficulty, appropriateness of terminology used and overlapping of items. Proper directions were given to students and other precautions were taken to ensure normal conditions during administration of the test.

Try out of the scale

Once the items have been framed and modified after getting suggestions and criticisms from experts. Then the test was administered to 110 students for which proper directions were given. Precautions were taken to ensure normal conditions during administration of the test.

 Discrimination Index

It measures the ability of an item which helps to differentiate between students of superior and inferior ability (Professional Testing Inc, 2006). To find out the discrimination index, the scores of the students were arranged in ascending order. Top 27% and bottom 27% students were constituted the upper and lower groups respectively. Wiersma and Jurs (1990) stated that “27% is used because it has shown that this value will maximize differences in normal distributions while providing enough cases for analysis”. The means and standard deviation of delinquency proneness of both the groups for each item separately were computed and the t-ratio was used to compare the mean differences of the two groups on each item. The items which showed significant t-values were considered to be having good discriminative power as they differentiate between the low and high group. Such items were retained for the final draft and others with a non-significant t-value were eliminated. The final draft of the delinquency proneness having 50  items was prepared on the basis of item analysis

Item analysis is a technique through which valid and suitable items are selected and rest are eliminated or modified to suit the purpose. Likert type scales are constructed using item analysis in which an item is evaluated which can discriminate the individuals who got high and low score respectively. The statements which are able to discriminate well should be included in the final tool (Kothari, 2006). In nutshell, it can be said that item analysis demonstrate how effectively a given test item functions within the total test. So, item analysis was carried out after the tryout of the scale. In the delinquency proneness scale the scores were arranged in descending order and 27% high scoring subjects and 27% low scoring subjects were used for further process of standardization. The mean and standard deviation for each item was separately calculated to compare the mean difference on the basis of t-value. 

Final try-out To establish the reliability and validity of the test final draft of the test was administered on a sample of 100 students The range of scores on Delinquency Proneness Scale is 50-250. Reliability of the scale Reliability refers to the consistency of measurement-that is, how consistent test scores or other evaluation results are from one measurement to other. (Gronlund & Linn). A well prepared test should yield accurate results both at present as well as over time. For calculation of reliability of the present scale, test-retest method was used as this scale was in the form of rating scale. . Validity of the scale Validity means the degree to which a test measures what it provides to measure. A test is valid to the extent that inferences made from it are appropriate, meaningful and useful. Kaplan and Sacuzzo (2001) defined validity as “the agreement between a test score or measure and the quantity it is believed to measure. Content validity of the delinquency proneness scale was established after obtaining the verdict of the experts from the field of psychology and education on validity. Besides this, items of the scale were selected after carefully scrutinizing the definitions of delinquency. Hence the scale has fair degree of content validity.

1. Burt, C. (1949). The Young Delinquent. London: University of London Press Ltd. 2. Gronlund, N. E., & Linn, R. L. (1995). Measurement and Evaluation in Testing, 6 th Ed. New York: Mc Millan Publishing Company. 3. Jurs, S. G. & Wiersma, W. (1990). Educational measurement and testing. United States: A division of Simon and Schuster. 4. Kaplon, R. M., & Saccuzo, D. P. (2001). Psychological testing: Principles, applications and issues. Wordsworth: Thomson hearing. 5. Kothari, C. (2006). Research Methodology: Methods & Techniques. India: New Age International Publishers. 6. Kvaraceous, W. C. & Miller, W. B. (1954). Delinquent Behaviour, Culture and Individuals. Washington: National Education Association.