Construction and application of a self-siege scale among Secondary School Students in the City of Mosul

The present study aimed to construct a Self-Siege Scale and to administer it to secondary school students in the city of Mosul, drawing on the model of Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone, and Joyce Catlett (2013). In its final form, the scale consists of 30 items distributed across six dimensions: imitation of parental psychological defenses, conflicting-values conflicts, negative self-views, conformity to societal expectations, interpersonal relationships and dynamics, and identity conflicts, with five items per dimension (Firestone et al., 2013, p. 153).
The sample used for item analysis and construct validity comprised 399 male and female students, whereas the final administration sample comprised 600 students (300 males and 300 females). The psychometric properties indicated that the scale possesses face validity at an expert-agreement rate of 95% and test–retest reliability of 0.80. Item discrimination and internal-consistency analyses supported the retention of all thirty items, with item–total correlation coefficients ranging from approximately 0.375 to 0.534.
Administration of the scale revealed a sample mean of 62.14 (SD = 12.22) against a hypothetical mean of 60, t (599) = 4.29, p < 0.001, with a small effect size (d = 0.18). A statistically significant difference was found in favour of males (M = 63.34) compared with females (M = 60.94), t (598) = 2.42, p = 0.016, d = 0.20. The study concludes that the scale is suitable for research use, while clarifying that the findings do not indicate a markedly elevated level of self-siege, but rather a limited exceedance of the hypothetical mean.