Does the Over-Claiming Questionnaire measure overclaiming? Absent convergent validity in a large community sample

The Over-Claiming Questionnaire (OCQ) aims to provide a practical and cost-effective method of assessing individual differences in the tendency to misrepresent oneself in self-reports. OCQ bias measures have strong theoretical appeal but limited empirical demonstrations of validity. Using a sample of 704 adult community members, we found minimal support for the OCQ as an assessment of misrepresentation. We assessed misrepresentation by comparing self-reports of personality and cognitive ability against other criterion indicators of these trait levels (peer reports of personality and performance on a cognitive ability measure). OCQ bias measures bore no relationship with either of these self-criterion discrepancy measures, and were also unassociated with self-deceptive enhancement scores. One OCQ index bore a modest relationship to narcissism. OCQ bias measures were instead consistently and sometimes even highly related to measures of careless responding. However, statistically controlling for careless responding only minimally improved the convergent validity of OCQ bias indices. (PsycINFO Database Record