Department of Educational Psychology
Date of this Version
Spring 2007
Abstract
Gifted students report that they are often perceived differently than nonidentified students (Cross, Coleman, & Stewart, 1993); thus, they employ social coping strategies to manipulate the visibility of their giftedness. The Social Coping Questionnaire (SCQ; Swiatek, 1995) was designed to assess these strategies. This studys purpose was to examine the SCQ’s factor structure with a sample of 600 younger (grades 5-7) and older (grades 8-11) gifted boys and girls in the US. and determine the tenability of the factor structure across age and gender groups. Participants’ scores were randomly assigned to either exploratory factor analysis (EFA) or confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Findings from EFA were tested with CFA. Together, these analyses revealed 6 factors. Factor loading patterns from multigroup analyses indicated differences between age and gender groups, and suggested that future investigations of gifted students’ social coping strategies include careful examination of the data for factor structure changes that are unique to the sample.
Comments
Published in Journal for the Education of the Gifted 30:3 (Spring 2007), pp. 353–71. Copyright © 2007 Prufrock Press Inc. (currently published by Sage Publications). Used by permission.