AjusteU Questionnaire

Abstract

The AjusteU Questionnaire is a psychometrically validated, multidimensional self-report measurement instrument formulated by Tania Elena Moreira-Mora, Adriana Mata-Salas, and Laura Vanesa Pizarro-Aguilar in 2023. Developed at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, the scale is designed to evaluate the multifaceted process of college adjustment among undergraduate students transitioning into tertiary education. Rooted in student development theory and interactionist models of higher education persistence, the questionnaire assesses three central dimensions of adaptation: Academic Adjustment, Social Adjustment, and Institutional Adjustment. The instrument was developed through an extensive empirical procedure beginning with an exhaustive bibliographic review that generated eight foundational indicators and an initial pool of 65 items. Through rigorous content validation with expert judges utilizing the Content Validity Index (CVI) and qualitative feedback from student focus groups, the pool was refined to 38 items. Subsequent psychometric evaluation with university students yielded a final 37-item scale structured across a clean three-factor latent model. Responses are registered along an authentic 7-point Likert-type scale. The AjusteU demonstrates exemplary internal consistency, evidenced by an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.913. Structural validity evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) affirmed strong goodness-of-fit parameters (χ² = 60.51, p = 0.00, Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = 0.98, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = 0.07). The scale exhibits robust convergent validity via a significant positive correlation (r = 0.582, p < 0.01) with the established Adaptation to University Life Questionnaire (Cuestionario de Adaptación a la Vida Universitaria; CAVU), as well as criterion-related predictive validity through significant correlations with first-term cumulative grade point averages. The AjusteU Questionnaire represents a robust, culturally attuned, and diagnostic instrument for higher education institutions, counseling departments, and retention researchers.

Keywords

AjusteU, college adjustment, university adaptation, academic adjustment, social integration, institutional commitment, psychometrics, higher education transition, student retention, confirmatory factor analysis, student guidance

Authors

The AjusteU Questionnaire was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a team of researchers and counseling specialists at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR), situated within the Department of Counseling and Psychology (Departamento de Orientación y Psicología):

• Tania Elena Moreira-Mora — Departamento de Orientación y Psicología, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica.
• Adriana Mata-Salas — Departamento de Orientación y Psicología, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica. (Corresponding Author; Email: [email protected]).
• Laura Vanesa Pizarro-Aguilar — Departamento de Orientación y Psicología, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica.

The authors developed this measure in response to institutional and regional demands across Latin America for a modern, psychometrically sound, and conceptually coherent diagnostic tool capable of identifying early indicators of student maladjustment, academic distress, and institutional attrition.

Purpose

The central purpose of the AjusteU Questionnaire is to evaluate, operationalize, and diagnose the multidimensional process of student adaptation to higher education. Entering university represents one of the most critical developmental milestones in emerging adulthood, requiring matriculating students to simultaneously navigate heightened intellectual rigor, novel bureaucratic frameworks, geographical relocation, shifting peer networks, and increasing autonomy. Inadequate adaptation across these areas frequently precipitates psychological distress, academic failure, and voluntary or involuntary institutional dropout.

From an applied clinical and institutional perspective, the AjusteU serves as an early screening and diagnostic instrument for university counseling centers, student welfare divisions, and academic advisors. Higher education administrators require timely, empirically validated screening mechanisms during the pivotal initial semesters to detect students at elevated risk of disengagement. By parsing the adjustment process into distinct academic, social, and institutional domains, the questionnaire allows university counselors to implement tailored psychoeducational interventions. For example, a student displaying low institutional adjustment but high academic capability may benefit from mentorship or campus affiliation groups, whereas a student struggling with academic adjustment requires learning strategy seminars or peer tutoring.

In academic research contexts, the AjusteU provides a theoretically grounded instrument for evaluating transition models, the efficacy of first-year experience (FYE) programs, and longitudinal retention dynamics. Understanding how individual traits (such as self-efficacy, emotional regulation, and socio-economic status) interact with institutional characteristics requires a psychometrically sensitive tool. The AjusteU fills a critical gap in Spanish-language psychological measurement, offering researchers an instrument developed and standardized directly within a Latin American university environment while adhering strictly to international standards for educational and psychological testing.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the AjusteU is college adjustment (or university adaptation), defined as a dynamic, interactive, and integrative process wherein an individual reconciles personal needs, goals, and behavioral patterns with the environmental, academic, social, and structural demands of higher education. College adjustment is not a singular trait or uniform state; rather, it is a complex, multifaceted equilibrium achieved over time. The AjusteU operationalizes this construct across three interrelated dimensions formulated through eight foundational conceptual indicators:

1. Academic Adjustment

Academic adjustment pertains to how effectively students cope with the intellectual, curricular, and pedagogical demands of university study. This dimension encompasses cognitive and behavioral modifications required to achieve academic success, including:

• Study strategies and learning autonomy: The capacity to plan, monitor, and regulate independent study schedules outside scheduled classroom instruction without external supervision.
• Self-efficacy and academic motivation: The degree of confidence a student possesses in mastering complex course material, sustaining intrinsic commitment toward their major, and handling academic stress.
• Classroom engagement and academic relationships: Interacting productively with university professors, asking questions, actively participating in seminars, and collaborating effectively on academic team projects.

Deficits in academic adjustment frequently manifest as procrastination, test anxiety, cognitive overload, poor grade point averages, and perceived incompetence.

2. Social Adjustment

Social adjustment addresses the student’s integration into the relational ecology of the campus. Transitioning to higher education disrupts established friendship networks and demands the establishment of new relational ties. This dimension evaluates:

• Peer relationship building: The formation of mutually supportive friendships, collaborative peer relationships, and functional study networks.
• Co-curricular engagement: Active involvement in student organizations, campus cultural activities, sporting events, and recreational clubs.
• Sense of belonging and relational security: The subjective feeling of acceptance, fellowship, and interpersonal connectedness within the student body, reducing feelings of isolation or alienation.

Students exhibiting poor social adjustment often suffer from profound loneliness, homesickness, social anxiety, and feelings of estrangement, which can exacerbate academic decline.

3. Institutional Adjustment

Institutional adjustment refers to the degree of alignment, trust, and structural integration a student establishes with their specific university. This dimension captures the systemic and organizational components of higher education life:

• Institutional commitment and identification: Pride in attending the specific university, feeling connected to its overarching mission, and endorsing its core values.
• Navigational competence: The ability to comprehend and manage the university’s administrative services, physical layout, library infrastructure, registration platforms, and student support services.
• Institutional satisfaction: General contentment with the physical environment, campus facilities, technological resources, and overall institutional governance.

Impairments in institutional adjustment are direct predictors of institutional departure; even academically successful students may transfer or drop out if they perceive low organizational alignment or find administrative procedures impenetrable.

Theoretical Framework

The construction of the AjusteU Questionnaire is rooted in landmark paradigms of student development, organizational sociology, and educational psychology. Rather than viewing student success through an exclusively cognitive or intellective lens, the instrument draws upon integrative models that emphasize the continuous interaction between the student and the tertiary institutional environment.

Tinto’s Student Integration Model

The foundational bedrock of the AjusteU is informed by Vincent Tinto’s Student Integration Model (1975, 1993). Tinto posited that persistence and retention in higher education are functions of the degree of academic and social integration achieved by a student over time. Tinto conceptualized university adaptation as a longitudinal process wherein students enter with diverse pre-entry attributes (socio-economic background, prior schooling, individual abilities). Upon matriculation, their everyday encounters within the academic system (formal classroom performance, faculty interactions) and the social system (informal peer associations, extra-curricular participation) continually reformulate their institutional goals and commitments. Maladaptation occurs when integration across either system is interrupted, culminating in voluntary withdrawal or involuntary institutional dismissal. The AjusteU explicitly captures these theoretical vectors through its parallel Academic and Social adjustment subscales.

Bean’s Student Attrition Model

Complementing Tinto’s sociological framework, the AjusteU incorporates insights from John Bean’s Student Attrition Model (1980, 1983). Bean argued that student decisions to persist or depart are analogous to employee turnover in formal organizations. In addition to academic and social factors, student beliefs regarding institutional quality, bureaucratic effectiveness, campus climate, and structural support directly dictate institutional satisfaction and commitment. The inclusion of the Institutional Adjustment dimension within the AjusteU operationalizes Bean’s emphasis on organizational and systemic alignment, acknowledging that institutional bureaucracy and campus infrastructure exert powerful psychological influences on student persistence.

Baker and Siryk’s Multidimensional Conceptualization

The architectural configuration of the AjusteU also intersects with the multidimensional tradition popularized by Robert W. Baker and Bernard Siryk (1984, 1989), creators of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ). Baker and Siryk established that university adaptation cannot be indexed via a single global score without masking critical intra-individual variations. A student may thrive academically while simultaneously experiencing profound social alienation or institutional dissatisfaction. The AjusteU reflects this conceptual separation, providing independent subscale profiles alongside a global adaptation score, contextualized specifically to modern university operational dynamics.

Validity

The validation program for the AjusteU was executed in strict concordance with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, establishing content, convergent, predictive, and structural validity evidence across sequential empirical phases.

Content Validity

Content validity was established through an exhaustive qualitative and quantitative expert judgment procedure. Following an extensive bibliographic review that identified eight core conceptual indicators of college adjustment, the authors created an initial pool of 65 items. A panel of academic and psychological measurement experts evaluated each item regarding clarity, syntactic precision, theoretical relevance, and representativeness, utilizing the Content Validity Index (CVI). Based on CVI quantitative thresholds and qualitative expert commentary:

• 38 items were retained in their original wording due to exceptional clarity and index values.
• 16 items underwent substantial linguistic or structural revisions to rectify ambiguity or imprecise operationalization.
• 11 items were entirely eliminated due to content redundancy, low item-objective congruence, or inadequate psychometric discrimination.

Subsequently, a pilot qualitative study incorporating a student focus group was conducted to evaluate face validity, cognitive comprehensibility, and ecological relevance, leading to an optimized 38-item draft instrument for field testing.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating the scores of the AjusteU with an established criterion measure: the Adaptation to University Life Questionnaire (Cuestionario de Adaptación a la Vida Universitaria; CAVU), validated by Rodríguez-Ayan and Sotelo (2014). The bivariate correlation analysis demonstrated a statistically significant, robust positive correlation between the overall AjusteU and CAVU scores:

r = 0.582 (p < 0.01, two-tailed)

This substantial correlation confirms that the AjusteU measures the identical overarching psychological construct of university adaptation while retaining unique explanatory variance tailored to modern institutional life.

Predictive Validity

Predictive criterion-related validity was established by longitudinally tracking student cohorts into their first academic term. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses revealed that the AjusteU composite score and its Academic Adjustment subscale demonstrated statistically significant associations with students’ cumulative first-term grade point averages (GPA) and course completion rates. Higher overall adaptation scores at semester inception reliably predicted superior academic achievement and higher odds of continued institutional enrollment into subsequent academic semesters.

Reliability

The AjusteU Questionnaire exhibits exceptional internal consistency, confirming that its constituent items reliably capture the targeted latent variables without excessive measurement error.

In the primary empirical validation sample of Costa Rican university students, the comprehensive 37-item scale attained a global Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of:

α = 0.913

This high alpha value exceeds the standard 0.80 benchmark for psychometric research and comfortably surpasses the stringent 0.90 threshold recommended for individual-level diagnostic and clinical decision-making. Item-total correlation analyses demonstrated that each individual item contributed positively to global scale variance, with no item deletion resulting in an elevation of the composite alpha.

In addition to global internal consistency, each of the three underlying factors demonstrated strong subscale reliability:

• Academic Adjustment: Highly stable internal consistency reflecting cohesive measurement of learning autonomy, academic self-efficacy, and study competence.
• Social Adjustment: Robust item-subscale homogeneity index, confirming consistent assessment of peer integration and campus connectedness.
• Institutional Adjustment: Strong internal consistency verifying dependable evaluation of institutional attachment, navigational efficacy, and systemic satisfaction.

Structural equation modeling analyses further supported these findings through high composite reliability (CR) indices and acceptable average variance extracted (AVE) parameters across all three factors, minimizing standard error of measurement (SEM) throughout the scoring continuum.

Factor Analysis

The structural validity and dimensional architecture of the AjusteU were evaluated using a dual psychometric strategy involving both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Prior to conducting factor extractions, sample adequacy and matrix factorability were verified. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity yielded statistical significance (p < 0.001), and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy fell well into the meritorious range (> 0.85). Principal Axis Factoring with oblique rotation was conducted, allowing underlying dimensions to correlate naturally. The initial 38-item trial model revealed a clear three-factor latent structure. One item exhibiting weak factor loading (< 0.35) and elevated cross-loadings was eliminated, producing the definitive 37-item instrument.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm the empirical replicability of the three-factor model, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis using Maximum Likelihood estimation was conducted on the 37-item structure, categorizing items across the Academic, Social, and Institutional dimensions. The structural equation model demonstrated outstanding goodness-of-fit indices:

• Model Chi-Square (χ²): 60.51 (df adjusted)
• Statistical Significance (p): 0.00
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.98
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.07

The CFI value of 0.98 significantly surpasses the conventional 0.95 benchmark for superior model fit, while the RMSEA value of 0.07 falls comfortably within the accepted 0.05–0.08 threshold indicative of adequate-to-good fit with the observed data. Standardized factor loadings across all 37 items were statistically significant (p < 0.001) and substantial, confirming that the three-factor model accurately reflects the empirical structure of university adjustment.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical administration specifications, formatting properties, and scoring architecture of the AjusteU Questionnaire are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: AjusteU Questionnaire (Cuestionario AjusteU)
• Test Type: Original psychometric self-report questionnaire
• Item Count: 37 items (refined from an initial 65-item conceptual pool)
• Latent Dimensions / Subscales:
  • Academic Adjustment (items tapping study habits, intellectual efficacy, curricular satisfaction, academic interaction)
  • Social Adjustment (items tapping peer networking, extracurricular participation, relational belonging)
  • Institutional Adjustment (items tapping organizational commitment, administrative navigation, campus satisfaction)
• Response Scale: Items are rated using a 7-point Likert-type scale.
• Administration Format: Individual or group administration; available via paper-and-pencil or online digital survey formats.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Target Population: Undergraduate university students; adults (18 years and older).
• Original Language: Spanish (Costa Rican normative cohort).
• Scoring Procedures: Dimensional scores are calculated by summing or averaging the respective items assigned to each of the three subscales. Negatively phrased items are reverse-coded prior to summation. A global adjustment score is derived from the aggregate total across all 37 items. Higher scores reflect superior adaptation and integration into university life.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 2023
• Originating Institution: Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR), Departamento de Orientación y Psicología, Cartago, Costa Rica.
• Copyright & Permissions: The AjusteU Questionnaire is protected under academic intellectual property rights held by the authors and the publishing journal. Researchers, university guidance centers, and psychological practitioners wishing to utilize, reproduce, translate, or adapt the scale must obtain written permission from the corresponding author.
• Corresponding Author Contact: Adriana Mata-Salas, Departamento de Orientación y Psicología, Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Email: [email protected].
• Administration Fee: Free of charge for non-commercial educational and academic research purposes upon formal author authorization.

References

• Baker, R. W., & Siryk, B. (1984). Measuring adjustment to college. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31(2), 179–189. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.31.2.179
• Baker, R. W., & Siryk, B. (1989). Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ): Manual. Western Psychological Services.
• Bean, J. P. (1980). Dropouts and turnover: The synthesis and test of a causal model of student attrition. Research in Higher Education, 12(2), 155–187. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00976194
• Bean, J. P. (1983). The application of a model of turnover in work organizations to the student attrition process. The Review of Higher Education, 6(2), 129–148. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.1983.0026
• Moreira-Mora, T. E., Mata-Salas, A., & Pizarro-Aguilar, L. V. (2023). Evidencias de validez de una escala para evaluar el ajuste a la vida universitaria [Evidence of validity of a scale to assess college adjustment]. Avances en Psicología Latinoamericana, 41(3), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.12804/revistas.urosario.edu.co/apl/a.12456
• Rodríguez-Ayan, M. N., & Sotelo, M. (2014). Validación del Cuestionario de Adaptación a la Vida Universitaria (CAVU) en estudiantes uruguayos de nuevo ingreso. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología, 46(2), 83–95.
• Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89–125. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543045001089
• Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Items of the Scale