Unembodiment in the Internet. Part 2. Psychometric Verification of the Questionnaire

Abstract

The purpose of present study is to develop and verify the questionnaire aimed at assessing the degree of unembodiment in the Internet as a consequence of using modern information technologies. The use of modern information technologies is associated with disembodiment, liberation of the Self from the body and related experiences. Immersion in virtual reality and “disembodiment” can cause the existential position of “unembodiement”, the features of which, according to the concept of the English psychologist R. Lang, are most clearly manifested in the clinic of schizoids. The study was conducted in the form of a psychodiagnostic survey, during which the reliability and validity of the developed method for assessing unembodiement on the Internet was tested. The main sample of the study was 809 people (31% of males), mostly university students, aged 17 to 25 years (M=18.73; SD=0.98). Smaller samples were used to study convergent and discriminant validity: 423, 324, 148 and 128 people. Correlations with measures of psychological consequences of Internet use, self-efficacy and life-meaning orientations reported convergent validity, and correlations with measures of intelligence and creativity reported discriminant validity. The results of principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFI=0.936, TLI=0.925, RMSEA=0.055, SRMR=0.059) confirm the construct validity of the method, which includes three subscales (Unembodiment as Virtualization, The Preference of the Internet, and Vitality of the Embodied Self) and a general scale (Unembodiment in the Internet). The one-step reliability of the scales varied from 0.7 to 0.9. The scales Vitality of the Embodied Self and The Preference of the Internet had a high level of discrimination, the scale Unembodiment as virtualization ― moderate. The developed questionnaire meets the requirements of validity and reliability and can be used to study the phenomenon of unembodiment on the Internet.

Keywords

• disembodiment
• unembodiment on the internet
• validity
• reliability
• psychometrics
• personality questionnaire