A bidimensional instrument to assess the sense of guilt in childwood: the Guilt Feelings Scale for Children (GFS_C)

In the psychoanalytical theoretical perspective the Sense of Guilt has been formulated in terms of the two related constructs: Persecutory Guilt and Reparative Guilt. The focus of this paper is to develop a bi-dimensional Scale of the Sense of Guilt for Children and verify its conceptual structure via exploratory and confirmatory approaches. Starting from two scales for adults prosed by Caprara and colleagues (1990), the authors develop the Guilt Feeling Scale for Children (GFS_C) that in the final version includes 9 items for Persecutory Guilt (P-GFS_C), 9 items for Reparative Guilt (R-GFS_C), and 6 control items. The sample was composed of 242 Italian children (132 males and 110 females), aged 8-11. Overall, results confirmed the hypothesized structure of the scale providing a good level of fit of the model to the data. Finally, the results showed a good internal consistency of the global scale and of both the subscales.