Approbation and Validation of the «Index of Autonomous Functioning» (IAF) in the Russian Sample

One of the key issues in contemporary psychology is a correlation between determinism and indeterminism in understanding human behaviour. Autonomy as self-determined behaviour, as an individual's autonomous choice of behaviour, is one of the most significant and sought-after constructs in the study of personality functioning. In E. Deci and R. Ryan's self-determination theory (SDT), the need for autonomy is one of the basic innate needs of the personality, and this confirms the need for a person to feel as an actor, an initiator, the cause of one's own life and to act in harmony with one's integrated Self. The article presents the procedure of adaptation of the Russian-language version of the “Index of Autonomous Functioning” (IAF) developed within the macro-theory of self-determination by E. Deci and R. Ryan. The methodology assesses the need for autonomy, including such characteristics as authorship in life, self-interest and susceptibility to external control. In the article we studied the results of reliability and accuracy assessment (Cronbach's coefficient – 0,774) on a sample of 689 university students in Saint Petersburg. The structure of the questionnaire had three scales: authorship, susceptibility to control, and interest. Correlation analysis confirmed the correlation of the scales with other methods of measuring autonomous behavior, such as "Subjective Quality of Choice", "The Existence Scale", "World Assumptions Scale" and "Stolin Self-Relationship Questionnaire". Testing of diagnostic sensitivity of the Russian version of the questionnaire showed positive results, revealing significant level differences between three clusters: respondents with high, medium and low autonomous functioning index, as well as significant differences in gender and level of education of the respondents. A positive correlation was found between the overall IAF score, the interest-taking subscale, and the age of respondents (within Russian sample). According to the results, the Russian-language version of the “Index of Autonomous Functioning” has good psychometric characteristics and can be used as a qualitative research tool.

Introduction

The concept of autonomy (Greek: autos - self and nomos - law) has deep philosophical roots and is understood as the presence of an object or phenomenon with its own immanent laws of existence and development. If we talk about the ethical self-determination of a person on the basis of his own mind and strength in accordance with his nature, then, according to I. Kant, “only such self-determination is consistent with the dignity of a morally mature personality” [1]. It is of no coincidence that appealing to the phenomenon of autonomy attracts not only the attention of modern philosophers, but also psychologists, and becomes an urgent problem which requires a search for new approaches and solutions.

Autonomy, initiative, independence, involvement in life, responsibility, the ability to make decisions and choices are necessary qualities, the increasing importance of which is caused by (based on) global social transformations, an expansion of opportunities and life alternatives, the need for self-determination and self-expression. Each of the listed characteristics is closely related to a conscious attitude to life, to the processes of internal intentional movement: understanding oneself, realizing oneself, changing oneself, that is, the self-determination of personality. Meanwhile, there is no consensus among researchers regarding the definition of autonomy.

Autonomy is proposed to be considered as a synonym for freedom, as a separate individual disposition of personality, as self-regulation, and even as a characteristic of relationships with other people [35]. Freedom as an experience of self-determination is considered by W. Tageson, linking it with the development of self-awareness [30]. According to J. Rychlak, self-determination is the ability of a subject to determine his own activity based on his desires and meaningful goals arising from them [6].

Possession of autonomy is recognized as the main characteristic of a subject in the theory of R. Harre [19]. A full-fledged subject (agent) manifests himself in the ability to choose guiding principles of behavior, the ability to switch between different determinants, as well as the ability to self-intercede (control over influences from the external environment; change one’s lifestyle) [6]. A. Bandura considers one of the main manifestations of subjective determination to be the ability to act contrary to the influence of external factors, and to resist them in situations of pressure and coercion [12].

The most famous and widespread theory at the moment, in which the concept of autonomy is developed from the point of view of a special basic need of personality is the self-determination theory (SDT) by E. Deci and R. Ryan [26]. According to the theory, autonomy is considered as self-determined behavior, which corresponds to the values, needs and interests of an individual [17, 33]. The choice of behavior is made by a person independently on the basis of intrapersonal determinants. According to E. Deci and R. Ryan, to be autonomous means to be self-initiated and self-regulated, to live in accordance with one’s Self. An autonomous personality shows flexibility in regulating interactions with the environment, feels free, spontaneous and creative. The degree to which behavior is autonomous, volitional and regulated by the person himself rather than by external circumstances, can be determined by a variety of positively experienced events and behavioral reactions [24]. From the point of view of an individual’s psychological well-being, a high level of autonomy is associated with many positive factors: from increased productivity to higher assessments of one’s own well-being and relationships [24, 31].

In Russian psychology, much attention is also paid to the problem of personal autonomy. According to D.A. Leontiev et al., an autonomous personality is characterized by freedom – the highest form of activity, expressed in the ability to initiate, stop or change the direction of activity at any point, and responsibility - the highest form of self-regulation, expressed in the awareness and use of oneself as a cause for changes in oneself and the external world [4].

As O.E. Dergacheva, L.Ya. Dorfman, D.A. Leontiev (2008) point out, to measure the level of self-determination and autonomy of a person, there are a number of English-language methods: the Worthington Autonomy Scale, Gough and Heilbrun’s Adjective Check List, the Jackson Personality Research Form, the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Interpersonal Dependency Inventory, Beck's Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale, however, they are little known and rarely used in Russian studies [3]. Other methods, for example, the General Causality Orientations Scale (GCOS), as well as the Russian version of the Freedom/Determinism Beliefs Inventory (FAD-Plus) are only indirectly related to assessing the level of personal autonomy [3, 8].

Meanwhile, as part of the empirical testing of self-determination theory, a technique was developed directly aimed at measuring autonomous functioning - the Index of Autonomous Functioning (hereinafter referred to as IAF) [33]. The authors proposed a dispositional autonomy scale reflecting its main components: authorship/self-congruence, interest-taking and low susceptibility to control. As the developers of the method point out, before the advent of the IAF, there was no systematic assessment of all three components, although their individual components could be studied as part of the methods developed in previous years [3, 14, 27].

The first component of autonomy in the structure of the IAF is authorship or self-congruence. An autonomous person perceives his behavior as self-consistent and holistic, he is interested in self-exploration and can use the awareness of his values, feelings and needs to act congruently [14, 15, 23]. It should be noted that this understanding of self-congruence is similar to the concept of authenticity described in existential literature [33, 34].

The second component of autonomy is interest-taking, that is, a person’s willingness to openly reflect on internal and external events, motivated attention and a person’s receptiveness to both positive and negative experiences [32]. Interest-taking promotes an awareness and ongoing understanding of oneself and one's experiences, which in turn is important for a high level of self-management associated with autonomy [20, 25].

The third component of autonomy is the absence of external and internal pressure on behavior, or a low susceptibility to control [16]. People with a dispositionally low autonomy show less personal choice and initiative and view behavior as a response to pressure from others' expectations or to introjected pressure and self-imposed oughts (demands) [33].

This technique and its modifications are actively used in foreign research, and have also been included in the methodological tools in a number of Russian works [10, 22, 28, 29]. The data obtained indicates the practical applicability of the IAF scale, confirmed by publications in foreign languages (Danish, French, German, etc.) [13, 18]. However, the psychometric validation and approbation of the scale in Russian-language studies has not been carried out before. The purpose of this article is to present a Russian-language adapted version of the Index of Autonomous Functioning (IAF).

Procedure and Methods for the Adaptation and Validation of the Questionnaire

At the first stage of adaptation, the original version of the method’s text was subjected to direct and reverse translation in compliance with the following rules and sequence of actions:

1) Preparation of the initial translation from the original language (English) into another language (Russian) by specialists with psychological and pedagogical education.

2) Expert content assessment of the translation for the purpose of checking the adaptation of the vocabulary and grammar on a Russian-speaking sample, taking into account its cultural and linguistic characteristics.

3) Checking the correspondence of the translation to the original, i.e. the correlation of the resulting translation of the questionnaire with the original by a reverse translation from Russian into English.

The first stage of the psychometric testing of the Russian version of the questionnaire was carried out on a sample of students from the Faculty of Medicine of St. Petersburg State University (N = 101) – 29 boys, 62 girls, aged from 17 to 19 years). The purpose of the testing was to confirm the quality of the translation and the possibility of its use for the main stage of adaptation.

Students from several St. Petersburg universities and secondary educational institutions (N=588) took part in the main stage of the questionnaire adaptation. The proportion of men was 45% (n = 263), the proportion of women was 55% (n = 325), the average age was 20.5 ± 2.39, Mo = 21. The sample of students is heterogeneous in terms of education level and includes: college students (0.7%), those with completed secondary vocational education (3.6%), students in higher education programs (56.1%), those with completed higher education in bachelor's or specialist programs (28.2%), studying in master's degree programs (9.7%), having completed higher education in a master's program (1.2%), studying in graduate school (0.5%).

To test the construct validity of the Russian-language version of the questionnaire, a set of techniques was used to measure characteristics that are directly related to the construct of autonomy and autonomous behavior:

1. The Subjective Quality of Choice questionnaire by D.A. Leontiev et al. (2007) was used to study individual strategies for making a choice and the characteristics of an individual’s attitude towards his own choice [7].
2. The Langle-Orgler Existence Scale adapted by S.V. Krivtsova et al. (2009) is aimed at measuring the subjective feeling of existential fulfillment, which corresponds to a meaningfulness of life, authenticity and congruence of the individual, his self-identity in various life situations, decisions and actions [5].
3. Self-attitude questionnaire by V.V. Stolin and S.R. Pantileev (1988) was included to evaluate the structure of a person’s self-attitude [11] and its impact on autonomy.
4. World Assumptions Scale (WAS) or the “Basic Beliefs” scale by R. Yanov-Bulman, adapted by M.A. Padun and A.V. Kotelnikova (2007) was used to study a person’s integral, implicit and stable ideas about themselves and the world, which influence the cognitive, emotional and behavioral spheres of an individual [9], and which could affect autonomous functioning.

Since the empirical data obtained has a normal distribution (the measures of kurtosis and skewness do not exceed 1 modularly), the parametric methods of statistical analysis were used to test the validity of IAF. Data processing was carried out in the IBM SPSS Statistics 28.0 and AMOS 28.0 programs.

Results

Checking the consistency of the items in the Russian version of the questionnaire showed the following results. The overall consistency of the questionnaire items (Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient) α = 0.741. At the same time, the highest consistency indicator α = 0.758 was obtained for the “susceptibility to control” subscale, for the “authorship/self-congruence” subscale it was α = 0.680, and for the “interest” subscale it was α = 0.579.

However, with the step-by-step exclusion of the “susceptibility to control” and “interest-taking” subscales, consistency on the “authorship/self-congruence” subscale increases to fairly high values - α = 0.781. The overall reliability and consistency of the questionnaire with stepwise elimination of two subscales was α = 0.774. It can be concluded that the characteristics of individual items are not ideal, however, work on further adaptation at this stage can be continued.

In testing the validity of the adapted questionnaire, descriptive statistics were also calculated for the subscale and total score of the Index of Autonomous Functioning(Table 1).

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for the Subscale of the “Index of Autonomous Functioning”

To test the structural validity of the Russian version of the IAF questionnaire, factor analysis was used with the principal component method using Varimax rotation. The Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy – 0.906, Bartlett’s test – p=0.000. The results showed that the number and structure of the obtained factors completely coincide with the original structure, which indicates in favor of the theoretical model. An additional check of the factor structure using the method of oblique (non-orthogonal) rotation (“Direct oblimin”) confirmed the original three-factor structure, as well as the assignment of the second question to the third factor (r = 0.322, for the “authorship” factor r = 0.155). The resulting factor loadings are presented in Table 1.

Table 2. Factor Structure of the Russian Version of the Index of Autonomous Functioning (Principal component analysis)

To test the three-factor structure of the questionnaire, confirmatory factor analysis was used with the AMOS 28.0 program. The results showed that all variables corresponded to latent factors (Figure 1). Scores for the “authorship” factor ranged from 0.77 to 0.85, for the “interest-taking” factor – from 0.72 to 0.80, for the “susceptibility to control” factor – from 0.60 to 0.68, (p <0.001). The correspondence of the three-factor model to the obtained data can be considered acceptable: the adjusted comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.9; the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.095; ratio of chi-square minimum and DF (CMIN/DF) = 6.3 (p<0.05). According to these findings, a three-level structure is an appropriate description of the data.

Figure 1. Factor Structure of the Russian Version of the Index of Autonomous Functioning (Confirmatory factor analysis)

Thus, the original three-factor structure of the questionnaire, identified by the authors of the original “Index of Autonomous Functioning - IAF” method [33], was confirmed. The results of factor analysis showed that in order to maintain compatibility with the original structure of the questionnaire, it is advisable to refuse to make any additional modifications to the resulting Russian-language text, due to the fact that changing individual items can lead to a decrease in the accuracy of the translation and a decrease in the semantic consistency of the Russian-language and original questionnaire options.

The construct validity of the Russian version of the “Index of Autonomous Functioning” questionnaire was tested using correlation analysis of the data using methods on a sample of St. Petersburg universities students (N= 588). The results of the correlation analysis are shown in Table 3.

Table 3.Indicators of the Pearson Correlation Coefficient Between the Scales of the IAF Method and Other Constructs (N=588)

Note: ** - correlation is significant at p<0.01 level; * - correlation is significant at p<0.05 level.

The subscales of the Index of Autonomous Functioning have significant relationships with all scales of the “Subjective Quality of Choice”, “Existence Scale”, “Self-Attitude Questionnaire” and “Basic Beliefs Scale” methods. Let us consider in detail the highest significant correlations (Table 3).

The highest and most significant correlation coefficients were obtained between the indicators of the scales and the indicators on the IAF subscale "authorship/self-congruence". The feeling of being the author of one’s behavior corresponds to high satisfaction with one’s own choices and decisions, a positive global self-attitude, a high expression of self-esteem and self-confidence. Autonomous functioning, which implies the implementation of personally significant choices that are congruent with one’s own values and beliefs, is associated with the subjective well-being of the individual, which is also manifested in the satisfaction with one’s decisions and adequate positive self-esteem.

In addition, self-congruity according to the IAF questionnaire is associated with the ability for self-transcendence (going beyond one’s “I”) and internal personal freedom. The general indicator according to the IAF method also positively correlates with a high level of self-transcendence.

To test the differentiating ability of the resulting Russian-language version of the questionnaire, a cluster analysis of the data was carried out. Using the method of hierarchical clustering and k-means clustering according to the IAF scales, 3 clusters are identified (p<0.05) (Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Average Values of the Obtained Clusters on the IAF Subscales

Thus, the first cluster (298 people, 50.6%) consisted of respondents with high values on all scales of the “Index of Autonomous Functioning”, except for the opposite scale “susceptibility to control.” The second cluster (120 people, 20.4%) – of respondents with low values on all scales of the Index of Autonomous Functioning, with the exception of the “susceptibility to control” subscale, which is characterized by high values in this group. The third cluster (170 people, 28.9%) consisted of respondents with average values on the “interest” and “sensitivity to control” scales and a high level on the “authorship/self-congruence” scale.

The diagnostic sensitivity of the questionnaire was tested using Student's T-test, a one-way analysis of variance and the Pearson correlation analysis.

Using Student's T-test, significant differences in the average values of the questionnaire indicators by gender were identified: the average values on the “Interest” subscale are lower in men (M=3.4±1.07, p<0.01) than in women (M =3.8±1.01); the average values for the general IAF indicator are also lower in men (M=3.3±0.45, p<0.05) than in women (M=3.4±0.48) (Figure 3).

Fig. 3. Differences in the Average Values of the IAF Questionnaire Indicators by Gender

According to the results of the one-way analysis of variance, significant differences were found in groups with different levels of education for the subscales: susceptibility to control (F=2.67, p<0.05), interest-taking (F=7.29, p<0.01) and for the general indicator on the IAF scale (F=2.47, p<0.05).

The highest results for the general IAF index were found in the group of postgraduate students (M=3.8±0.41), and the lowest – among those receiving secondary vocational education (M=3.0±0.48) (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Differences in the Average Values of the General Indicator of the IAF Questionnaire by Level of Education (p<0.05)

Correlation analysis of Pearson's r showed weak positive relationships with age for two IAF subscales: the interest indicator is positively correlated with age (r=0.11**, p<0.01); and the overall measure of autonomous functioning was also positively associated with age (r =0.08*, p<0.05).

Discussion

As follows from the presented results, the Russian translation of the method, designated as the “Index of Autonomous Functioning (IAF),” reveals good psychometric characteristics, which are manifested in the parameters of the structural model, assuming the relationship of its scales with each other, as well as in the indicators of internal consistency of the scales (Cronbach's alpha α=0.741). The original structure of the technique is well reproduced. The number and structure of the obtained factors completely coincide with it, which testifies in favor of the theoretical model and allows us to talk about the technique as a high-quality diagnostic tool. The “sensitivity to control” subscale demonstrates the need for additional testing or consideration of the influence of other (cross-cultural or age-related) characteristics. However, we note that the authors of the original version of the method, based on the results of seven studies, using the subscales separately, also draw attention to the ambiguity of the data obtained [34].

The adapted Russian-language version of the questionnaire demonstrates a high differentiating ability. The wording of a number of points of the method can be further clarified, which could increase the homogeneity of the scales, but their current parameters allow for the method to be used in its current form, without additional textual changes.

The performed validation and adaptation of the Russian-language version of the IAF questionnaire not only confirm the construct validity of the method, but also lead to interesting substantive conclusions. The construct of “authorship/self-congruence,” which is a key component of autonomous functioning, is closely related in meaning to the problems of existential psychology, the concepts of self-transcendence and internal freedom of the individual, which are components of existential fulfillment. The results obtained prove the effectiveness of the adapted method in the study of existential aspects of choice, features of the manifestation of authenticity and self-identity of the individual, characteristics of the value-semantic sphere.

Also, the subscales of the questionnaire are consistent with other constructs that are similar in meaning and included in the current problem field of modern personality psychology. Personal self-determination and its ability to function autonomously are closely related to the key characteristics of self-attitude, self-esteem and self-confidence, as well as the subjective assessment of one’s own choices as independent, thorough, positive and satisfactory. A high level of personal autonomy is consistent with the expression of basic beliefs about the benevolence and fairness of the world, a positive image of one’s own “I,” faith in luck and the ability to control events occurring in life.

Conclusion

Thus, the results obtained made it possible to discover the correlations between the components of self-determination and relatively stable personality characteristics, including the global self-attitude and characteristics of the value-semantic sphere of the individual – deep beliefs, the belief in a just and safe world, and the idea of the value of one’s own “I”. In addition, according to our research, the autonomous functioning of the individual is associated with the procedural and existential aspects of choice, the desire to find and realize individual life meaning. A prospect for further research may be to clarify the nature of the identified relationships, as well as cross-cultural studies of the specification of subscales of the questionnaire and autonomous self-regulation of behavior in general.

It can be concluded that the adapted version of the Index of Autonomous Functioning (IAF) questionnaire is a valid and qualitative research instrument. The work done allows us to supplement the currently available arsenal of Russian-language methodological tools for studying the phenomenon of self-determination and autonomous behavior of the personality.

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