Test-retest studies for assessing stability and change are widely used in different domains and allow improved or additional individual estimates of interest to be obtained. However, if these estimates are to be validly interpreted the responses given at Time-2 must be free of retest effects, and the fulfilment of this assumption must be…

Temperament is a developmentally important construct, hierarchically comprised of several lower-order dimensions subsumed under effortful control, negative affectivity, and surgency. The Children's Behavior Questionnaire-Very Short Form (CBQ-VSF) was developed as a brief measure of the higher-order factors of temperament to aid researchers in…

The development and validation of the Brazilian Temperament Scale for Students (BTSS) are examined through the use of data from 1,258 children and adolescents, ages 10 through 21 (M = 15.0, SD = 2.1, 56% females). Three psychometric properties of BTSS are reported: its internal structure (e.g., validity), its reliability, and cut points to best…

This study tests the temporal stability and the concurrent and predictive validity of the Emotional and Personality-related Career decision-making Difficulties (EPCD) model and questionnaire. Five hundred forty-three participants filled out the EPCD twice, 3 years apart. The Anxiety cluster was the most stable of the three, followed by the…

This article describes a 2-session laboratory project in which students develop, conduct, and attempt to validate an interview-based personality assessment. In Session 1, students learn about effective interview procedures and then design and pilot-test an interview to assess 4 personality traits (emotionality, activity level, sociability, and…

Utilizing 182 subjects, this study determined the concurrent validity between the Activity Vector Analysis (AVA) index of anxiety and scores on the IPAT Anxiety Scale. The IPAT and the AVA index of anxiety seem essentially to measure the same construct of basic anxiety. (Author/PN)

The Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ) was developed as a short, factor-analytic screening device for difficultness. Responses of 322 mothers of four- to six-month-old infants suggested that they regard fussy, hard-to-soothe, labile infants as difficult. Mother characteristics may affect perceptions of infant difficultness with…

Examined the construct validity of the Middle Childhood Temperament Questionnaire. Factor analysis revealed five factors. The factors of task persistence, negative reactivity, approach-withdrawal, and activity, but not the factor of responsiveness, were determined to have satisfactory levels of reliability. (MM)

Questionnaires are vulnerable to joking and suffer from lack of agreement regarding the unitary traits through which scales are validated. Eight basic requirements for construction of factor-true scales are established and it is shown that one or more of the requirements is missing for 80 percent of recently published questionnaires. (Author)

An instrument for measuring the value orientation of educational administrators was constructed following the model developed by England for measuring the value orientation of managers. The instrument was administered, via mail, to a stratified sample of 210 administrators from five States in the Plains and Rocky Mountain areas. Respondents rated…

The design of a school anxiety questionnaire is described. The model predicts a maximal relationship between anxiety and performance when type of anxiety potential, type of stress, and type of behavior are in parallel. The test, developed with intermediate school children, is a five scale 105 item multiple choice questionnaire with responses on a…

This study's aim was to assess the validity of naive subjects' implicit personality theories, the correspondence among the theories, and the influence of social desirability on them. High school girls classified the items from the MMPI Psychopathic Deviate scale into clusters representing different traits. These clusters agreed closely with the…

This third document in a three-volume summative evaluation report submitted to the National Institute of Education presents a portion of the internal evaluation conducted by the Mountain-Plains program, a residential, family-based education program developed to improve the economic potential and lifestyle of selected student families in a…

This handbook contains a synopsis of the technical data on a variety of tests and inventories used in career assessment. The test abstracts provided include a description of the components of the tests, norms used, coefficients of reliability and validity, and the advantages of uses of the tests. The tests are grouped in three categories: (1)…