The Reasons for Living Inventory: psychometric properties

The test-retest reliability, internal consistency reliability, normative, and item analysis data of the Reasons for Living Inventory were investigated in a sample of 116 college students. The inventory has six subscales, each of which assesses a category of adaptive beliefs and expectations considered reasons for not committing suicide. The inventory was administered twice, with a 3-week interval between testings. Test-retest coefficients for the men, women, and total sample were moderate to high. The alpha coefficients and item-total correlations for the subscales and the total inventory provided strong support for internal consistency. 26 items were consistently endorsed by 30% or more of our total sample as "extremely important," while only four were suggested as "not at all important" reasons for not committing suicide.     

Attitudes toward women and their work roles: Effects of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations

This study examined the effects of personal religious orientation, religious denomination, and gender on attitudes toward women and their work roles using a sample of 263 single undergraduate university students. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation put significantly more emphasis on family than career in their anticipated general lifestyle relative to those with a low intrinsic religious orientation. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation were also more likely to anticipate the female spouse spending less time in a profession during the children's early years. Males showed more traditional attitudes toward women than females, but there were no gender effects on measures of preferred general lifestyle, preferred child-care distribution, or preferred career involvement for the wife. Subjects belonging to mainline and conservative denomination did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward women or their work roles.     

Assessing privacy invasiveness of psychological test items: Job relevant versus clinical measures of integrity

This pilot study was conducted to determine if clinically-oriented test items are judged to be more offensive than job-related test items. Clinical tests typically ask more personal questions while employment tests usually ask job-relevant questions. A random selection of items from three employment tests was analyzed. Two of the tests evolved from clinical-personality tests, while the third test was designed specifically for employment settings. The results suggest that if companies are interested in using employment tests that are perceived as being job-relevant, inoffensive, and non-invasive, then they should consider selecting tests that include job-relevant items as opposed to tests that are derivatives of clinical assessment instruments.     

An analysis of performance by pre-school children on the KRISP and on a length discrimination task

The speed and accuracy of judgements made by pre-school children on the Kansas Reflection-Impulsivity Scale for Pre-schoolers (KRISP - Wright 1971, 1973) and on a two-choice length discrimination task were investigated. If subjects were relatively accurate on the KRISP then correct responses tended to be faster than errors while if subjects were relatively inaccurate errors were the faster. It is inferred that accurate subjects respond asymptotically in terms of a speed-accuracy tradeoff while inaccurate subjects set a less demanding criterion. Accurate subjects showed a tendency to increase inspection time as a function of item difficulty. This relation did not hold for inaccurate subjects.However, groups classified by means of the KRISP did not differ in either the speed of correct responses or accuracy of line length discriminations. For all groups judgement times were significantly related to stimulus differences and to stimulus ratios. There was no evidence that so-called impulsive children engage in less efficient and less detailed processing than other children.It is argued, contrary to the view of Kagan and his co-workers (e.g. Kakan 1966), that speed and accuracy of responding may not reflect a stable trait dimension. Rather children appear to be able to change their strategies according to the particular demands, implicit or explicit, of the task.     

A MODEL FOR THE USE OF ATTITUDE SCALES ACROSS CULTURES

To minimize the verbal content of the attitude measurement situation with Papua New Guinea students, a set of pictorial items was selected for use in the place of verbal items. Initially, 150 pictures related to concepts in the Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory (WPAI) were described by a group of 50 students. Seventy of these items, those which were described in a consistent way, were presented to 227 students along with a Papua New Guinea version of the WPAI. A final set of 25 pictures was selected on the basis of their discriminative power, internal consistency, and their content validity. Reliability and validity measures and the rotated factor structure of the 25 item pictorial scale were consistent with the WPAI.     

Psychometric and instructional validation approaches in the hierarchical sequencing of learning tasks

Two strategies used to test prerequisite relationships among intellectual skills were employed to examine the sequence of three types of subtraction tasks. A psychometric validation strategy yielded results similar to an instructional validation strategy. This finding provides support for the use of the more efficient psychometric approach for validating large numbers of learning hierarchies in relatively short periods of time.     

Perceived control in continuous loud noise

The effects of two types of perceived control were assessed for performance during and following exposure to continuous loud noise at 90 dBC. Subjects performed a tracking task during exposure and the Stroop test in the period following exposure. Control could be effected either (1) by attenuating the intensity of the noise or (2) by reducing the difficulty of the tracking task. In both cases subjects were encouraged not to exercise control. Performance in treatments involving loud (90 dBC) and soft (55 dBC) noise served as baseline conditions. Perceived control of task difficulty accentuated the tendency for root-mean-square error to rise during the tracking task. There were no significant effects of noise intensi ty on tracking performance. Loud noise reduced the incidence of errors in the Stroop test but perceived control failed to influence this effect. The results are discussed in terms of the generality of perceived control phenomena.     

Controlled attending as a function of melodic and temporal context

Melodic and rhythmic context were systematically varied in a pattern recognition task involving pairs (standard-comparison) of nine-tone auditory sequences. The experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that rhythmic context can direct attention toward or away from tones which instantiate higher order melodic rules. Three levels of melodic structure (one, two, no higher order rules) were crossed with four levels of rhythm [isochronous, dactyl (A U U), anapest (U U A), irregular]. Rhythms were designed to shift accent locations on three centrally embedded tones. Listeners were more accurate in detecting violations of higher order melodic rules when the rhythmic context induced accents on tones which instantiated these rules. Effects are discussed in terms of attentional rhythmicity.