engleski

Croatian translation and validation of three different autobiographical memory questionnaires

Autobiographical memory is the chronicle of our lives. We store our personal experiences in it and we consult it whenever we want to “remember” something from our personal past. In Croatia there is not any questionnaire which assesses characteristics of personal autobiographical memory. The aim of this study is to test psychometric properties of the Croatian translation of three autobiographical memory questionnaires. A survey of Autobiographical memory (SAM ; Palombo, Williams, Abdi and Levine, 2012) is a measure of trait mnemonics in everyday life. It comprises items assessing self-reported episodic autobiographical, semantic, spatial and prospective memory about multiple events that happened in the past. Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (AMQ ; Fitzgerald and Broadbridge, 2013) is assessing perceived attributes of memory of specific event that happened in the past. Memory Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ ; Sutin and Robins, 2007) assess ten (10) relevant dimensions of autobiographical memory: vividness, coherence, accessibility, sensory details, emotional intensity, visual perspective, time perspective, sharing, distancing and valence, also about specific event that happened in the past. Students of Faculty of humanities and social sciences (N=168) participated in the study. Mean age of participants was 21 (M= 20.76 ; SD= 1.91). Participants were told to recall and describe memory that is personally meaningful to them. They were to answer the questions about that specific event in both MEQ and AMQ. Internal consistency was high in all three questionnaires (SAM: Cronbach α was 0.84 ; AMQ: Cronbach α was 0.83 ; MEQ: Cronbach α was 0.85). The results of the factor analysis for SAM have shown that when four-factor solution was forced, it produced good factor saturation for all items (>0.3) and explanation of 49.14% of overall variance. The results of the factor analysis for AMQ have shown that when one-factor solution was forced, it produced good factor saturation for all items (>0.5) and explanation of 33.47% of overall variance. The results of the factor analysis for MEQ have shown that when ten-factor solution was forced, it produced good factor saturation for all items (>0.4) and explanation of 57.66% of overall variance. We can conclude that the translated version of all three questionnaire about autobiographical memory have shown good psychometrics properties.

autobiographical memory; validation; questionnaires; students

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