Shostrom's personal orientation inventory: Arguments against its basic validity

Psychometric characteristics and validity of the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) are at issue in the literature, particularly sinece the reported POI's internal consistency reliabilities are below accepted levels for published tests. This paper contends that a likely root of serious problems lies in errors made in the original POI validation. It is shown that the POI fails to meet its long-standing published claim that it can discriminate between ‘self-actualized’ (SA) and ‘normal adults’, as this is shown not to be true for 75% of its scales. It is demonstrated that the original and extend validation was illogically based on mean values of test scores of validation subject groups instead of correctly using their score ranges. A substantial lack of discrimination between the SA and ‘non-self-actualizing’ norm groups is shown to arise from the overlap of their estimated correct validation ranges amounting to about 62–86% of their combined membership. A hypothesis is that the POI is not measuring the degree of SA sufficiently, but instead measures some other variable(s) that may be weak to moderate correlate. Alternatively, the differences in the three validation constructs used may have been weakly exemplified by the subjects chosen for the validation groups. Clinical and research use of the POI is questionable. Suggestions are made for a proper validation model and for POI revisions.