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A Likert-type scale was developed and used to measure attitudes toward recycling among 452 male and female undergraduates. The instrument had high pan-whole correlations and satisfactory reliability. There was a predictable relationship between attitudes toward recycling and attitudes toward environmental issues, rights issues, and political participation., Solutions to the increasingly serious problem of environmental waste in the United States are at least partially dependent on attitudes about recycling. In their comprehensive review of the literature, Van [...]

Tomkins's polarity theory and the Polarity Scale derived from it constitute a promising but relatively neglected approach to researching the relationship between personality and ideology. We investigated the psychometric properties of the Polarity Scale with a sample of White South African students (N = 79). Although adequate reliabilities were obtained for various scorings of the Polarity Scale, and previous research has shown that scores on the scale relate to personality and affective differences, in this study the scale failed to show correlations with political party preference, liberalism/conservatism self-rating, or anti-Black prejudice. Only the Humanist subscale had a significant, though not very strong, correlation with acceptance of parental religion. Scores on the Polarity Scale were also significantly, though weakly, related to right-wing authoritarianism. These findings suggest that items in the Polarity Scale did not relate strongly enough to indicators of ideological orientation to indicate that they play a primary causal role as the underlying organizing psychological dimension determining ideological orientation., RESEARCHERS HAVE NOT YET DEFINITIVELY CLARIFIED how sociopolitical attitudes are ideologically organized. Nonetheless, research using factor analyses of large numbers of social belief and attitude items has usually supported a [...]

The Reasons for Living Inventory (RFL) has been shown to be reliable and valid for adults. To ascertain its factor structure and internal consistency for adolescents, 128 southern high school students (mean age = 15 years) and 145 adolescent college students completed it. A six factor solution to a principal components factor analysis followed by varimax rotation accounted for 53.6% and 49.8% of the variance in the two groups. For both groups, Cronbach alphas were strong (range = .77 to .92) for all subscales except Moral Objections, which was unsatisfactory (.57 and .61). Means were higher than those of adults who reported never considering suicide. A Goodness of Fit Index was poor, suggesting that the factors in teens' reasons for living are different from adults. The overall RFL score appears to be a reasonable instrument for adolescents to use, and a low score should be taken as particularly troublesome.

The psychological test developed by Cassidy and Lynn to measure achievement motivation in 1989 can be used with adult employees in various countries because they are internally consistent. But it must be used with care because the items used are not simple in structure. The validity of the test must be further verified by psychometric analyses and experimental methods to make clear achievement motivation as a multidimensional psychological concept., Achievement motivation is a multidimensional concept defined as competition with a standard of excellence or as the desire of people to set and realize goals for themselves (Clark, Varadarajan, & [...]

The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) has been used in many studies of loss in pregnancy, including miscarriage, stillbirth, induced abortion, neonatal death, and relinquishment for adoption. This article describes 22 studies from 4 countries that used the PGS with a total of 2485 participants. Studies that report Cronbach's alpha for their own samples give evidence of very high internal consistency reliability. Evidence for the validity of the PGS is also reviewed, such as convergent validity seen in its association with measures of mental health, social support, and marital satisfaction. The standard errors of the means for the total scale and for the subscales reveal fairly consistent scores, in spite of very different samples and types of loss; computation of means and standard deviations for the studies as a whole permits us to establish normal score ranges. Significantly higher scores were found in studies that recruited participants from support groups and self-selected populations rather than from medical sources, and from U.S. studies compared with those in Europe.

The purpose of this article is to provide data on a recently developed instrument to measure the multidimensional nature of the bereavement process. In contrast to widely used grief instruments that have been developed using rational methods of instrument construction, the Hogan Grief Reaction Checklist (HGRC) was developed empirically from data collected from bereaved adults who had experienced the death of a loved one. Factor analysis of the HGRC revealed 6 factors in the normal trajectory of the grieving process: Despair, Panic Behavior, Blame and Anger, Detachment, Disorganization, and Personal Growth. Additional data are provided that support reliability and validity of the HGRC as well as its ability to discriminate variability in the grieving process as a function of cause of death and time lapsed since death. Empirical support is also provided for Personal Growth as an integral component of the bereavement process. The article concludes by considering the substantive as well as psychometric findings of this research for such issues as traumatic grief, anticipatory grief, change in the bereaved person's self-schema, and spiritual and existential growth.

ABSTRACT. Over the years, researchers have developed various short versions of the Marlowe--Crowne Social Desirability Scale (D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1960). The authors used confirmatory factor analyses (J. [...]

ABSTRACT. Global interpersonal mistrust is conceptualized as a general mistrust of the motives of others in situations related to one's well-being: a general tendency to view others as mean, selfish, [...]