Assessment, Statistics, and Research

  Scale name: Dispositional Joy Scale (DJS) Scale overview: The Dispositional Joy Scale (DJS) is a 16-item self-report measure of joy as a trait or disposition with strong psychometric support.   Response Type: Items are rated on a scale of agreement from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. The numbers 2 through 6 are not labeled. Scale items- example I often feel bursts of joy. I often feel blessed.     Reliability: Internal consistency was alpha = .954 (Study 1) and .96 and .97 (Study 2; Watkins et al., 2017). Validity: Factor analysis resulted in a one factor solution accounting for nearly 60% of the variance (Watkins et al., 2017). The Dispositional Joy Scale was significantly correlated with other positive psychology measures. Some examples follow with correlation coefficients next to the associated scale (Study 2, Watkins et al., 2017). State Joy Scale .68 State Gratitude .58 Trait Gratitude GRAT-S .68 Trait Gratitude GQ...

In this post, I refer to a set of items to assess gratitude. The  Gratitude Questionnaire  uses six items and was published by McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang in 2002. I have written elsewhere about gratitude . People high in the virtue of gratitude are often high in other virtues as well such as optimism and life satisfaction. They also tend to be more religious. In a previous post, The Psychology of Gratitude , I list some suggestions to increase gratitude. Reliability In previous research, the authors found support for one factor. Coefficient alpha , a measure of interitem consistency, ranged from .76 to .84 in samples reported by the authors  (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002; McCullough, Tsang, & Emmons, 2002). Rating the Scale Items When using the scale in surveys the items are rated on a 7-point scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). High scores indicate a higher level of self-reported gratitude. Here's the 7-point rating: 1 ...

  Happiness may be the quintessential positive feeling state. We commonly wish others a happy birthday or anniversary.  The Subjective Happiness Scale is a short four-item survey developed by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Heidi Lepper (1999) and has been completed by thousands of respondents.  The items are rated on 7-point scales that use different words to describe the end points.  A sample item calls for ratings of less happy (1) to more happy (7): “Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself…” Permissions : " Permission is granted for all non-commercial use." Availability : You can get the scale from the  Website :       http://sonjalyubomirsky.com/subjective-happiness-scale-shs/ SCOPES domain = Emotion Link to   List of Tests Scale Reference Lyubomirsky, S., & Lepper, H. (1999). A measure of subjective happiness: Preliminary reliability and construct validation. Social Indicators Research, 46 , 137-155. Creating Surveys on AMAZO...

Lions of Kruger/ Geoff Sutton 2009 Courage is a virtue. Despite being an ancient virtue, courage is a relatively new topic of study in psychological science. As with any psychological concept, definitions can vary. Woodward and his colleagues have begun a line of inquiry, which includes a measurement scale. Here’s a 2007 definition: “Courage is the voluntary willingness to act, with or without varying levels of fear, in response to a threat to achieve an important, perhaps moral, outcome or goal. (p. 136)”      Read more about the psychology of courage. Factor analysis suggested participants identified three types of threats: Physical, social, and emotional. When scale items were analyzed, four factors emerged, which were categorized by the authors as follows: 1. work/employment courage 2. patriotic/religion/belief-based courage 3. social-moral courage 4. independent or family-based courage 23-item Measure A popular measure of c...

The Adult Hope Scale The Adult Hope Scale developed by C. R. Snyder of the University of Kansas is an easy to use measure of hope. The original scale has 12-items, which measure two dimensions of hope based on hope theory. Four measure agency and four measure pathways--the other four are distractors. The agency concept measures the capacity to focus energy on a goal. The pathways concept assesses plans to achieve goals. In recent studies, the four distraction items are often dropped leaving 8-items. Researchers often use the total score for the 8-items as a measure of trait (aka dispositional) hope. Find Snyder's The Psychology of Hope I have also included a Spanish language measure of hope in this post. Here's the text we (Sutton et al., 2018) used to refer to the scale along with our findings. The items used a response format of 1 =  definitely false  to 8 =  definitely true . A sample item is, “I meet the goals I set for myself.” Snyder et al. (1991)...