Rasch Analysis and Item Reduction of the Chinese Version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20-C) for Adolescents

Alexithymia encompasses four dimensions, namely, a difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, confusion to distinguish between emotional arousals and bodily sensations, a poverty of imagination and fantasy life, and a concrete, reality-based cognitive style. The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) was designed to assess alexithymia in adult samples. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that alexithymia can be best represented as a three-factor model, including (1) difficulty of identifying feelings, (2) difficulty of describing feelings, and (3) externally oriented thinking. Given that alexithymia was found to be associated with the functioning of corpus callosum which develops robustly in adolescents, the use of TAS-20 on adolescents remained an open question. In light of this, the present study has two aims. First, this study aims to refine the TAS-20 for adolescent populations by using Rasch modelling analyses and the factor structure of the refined measurement of alexithymia will be evaluated by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (Study 1). Second, this study also aims to examine how far the results of EFA could be extended to Chinese adolescents in different grade levels by utilizing multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (Study 2). PARTICIPANTS & PROCEDURES Subjects were recruited from six secondary schools in Hong Kong. A total of 500 (from the first to the fifth forms) Chinese adolescents were recruited, comprising the first (n=138), second (n=134), third (n=139) and senior (n=89) formers in the present study. INSTRUMENTS -The Mandarin version of the TAS-20 (TAS-20-C) was slightly modified to accommodate colloquial usage. -20 items rated on 5-point Likert scale STUDY 1