Development and Psychometric Assessment of the Problematic QQ Use Scale among Adolescents

The QQ social media platform is very popular among Chinese adolescents. As with other social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), there have been increasing reports that the use of QQ can be potentially problematic to a minority of users. However, unlike these other social media platforms, there is currently no scale to assess the risk of problematic QQ use. The present study developed the Problematic QQ Use Scale (PQQUS) among Chinese adolescents based on six core criteria of behavioral addiction (salience, tolerance, mood modification, loss of control, withdrawal, and conflict) that have been used in the development of other social media addiction scales. The scale was administered to a sample of 1008 Chinese school children to assess its psychometric properties, utilizing both classical test theory and item response theory. The analysis demonstrated that the PQQUS had good item discrimination indices relating to both CTT and IRT. The CFA results and Loevinger’s H-coefficient suggested the PQQUS had a unidimensional factor structure. The PQQUS had good internal reliability, good composite reliability, and good concurrent validity (based on correlations with measures of anxiety, depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction). The invariance testing between boys and girls suggested this scale is a valid assessment tool for both groups. Overall, the PQQUS is a psychometrically robust tool for assessing problematic QQ use and will have a key role in further research on problematic QQ use among Chinese adolescents.