Psychometric Properties of Youth's Inventory of Callous Unemotional Traits (ICU-YV) in Male Teenagers

Introduction: Youth's inventory of callous-unemotional traits is used to measure the callous and unemotional traits in male teenagers. The questionnaire is made based on sociopathy screening tool and measures the dimensions of callousness, lack of empathy and lack of emotion. The purpose of the study is to investigate the psychometric properties of the Youth's inventory of callous-unemotional traits in a non-clinical sample.
Method: 300 male students with the average age of 16.38 were selected from Dezful high school by multi-stage random sampling. They completed the ICU Questionnaire (Frick, 2003) and Vandalism Questionnaire (VQ) (Thavabieh and Ahmad, 2010). The reliability of the ICU-YV was measured by three methods of confirmatory factor analysis, convergent validity and criterion validity; and the validity of the questionnaire is assessed by Cronbach alpha and split half method.
Results: Cronbach alpha was 0.65 for total scale and for subscales of callousness, lack of empathy and emotion was 0.56, 0.61 and 0.55, respectively. Split-half coefficient for total questionnaire was 0.56 and for mentioned subscales was 0.51, 0.63, and 0.49, respectively. The correlation between youth’ inventory of callous-unemotional traits and Vandalism Scale was significant at the level of p<0.01 (r=32). Moreover, the results of confirmatory factor analysis (RMSEA=0.05) indicated the suitable fitness of three-factor structure of ICU-YV.
Discussion and Conclusion: The results indicate that ICU-YU has a suitable reliability and validity in Iran.