Two promising shame and guilt scales: a construct validity comparison

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Personality Psychology
• Clinical Psychology

Background:

• Shame and guilt proneness are crucial personality dimensions.
• Accurate measurement of these emotions is vital for psychological research and clinical applications.
• Existing scales require rigorous validation to ensure their psychometric properties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the psychometric properties of two shame and guilt proneness measures: the revised Harder Personal Feelings Questionnaire (PFQ2) and the Hoblitzelle Adapted Shame and Guilt Scale (ASGS).
• To assess internal consistency, test-retest stability, factor structure, and construct validity of both scales.
• To explore the development of potentially improved scales based on factor and item analyses.

Main Methods:

• Administered PFQ2 and ASGS to 63 college students.
• Collected data on theoretically relevant personality scales.
• Analyzed internal consistency, test-retest stability, factor structure, and convergent/discriminant validity.

Main Results:

• Both scales demonstrated acceptable reliability and supported their respective shame and guilt factor structures.
• The ASGS shame subscale showed marginally better validity with external variables compared to PFQ2 shame.
• The PFQ2 guilt subscale exhibited significantly higher validity than the ASGS guilt subscale.

Conclusions:

• Both the PFQ2 and ASGS are reliable measures of shame and guilt proneness.
• Each scale has unique strengths, with ASGS better for shame and PFQ2 for guilt.
• Newly developed scales from item and factor analyses did not yield improved validity over the original measures.