Development of the scrupulosity inventory: A factor analysis and construct validity study.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Psychometrics

Background:

• Scrupulosity, a condition involving religious or moral obsessions and compulsions, is under-researched despite significant prevalence and morbidity.
• Existing assessment tools may not fully capture the complexity of scrupulosity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate the Scrupulosity Inventory (SI), a comprehensive tool for assessing scrupulosity.
• To examine the psychometric properties of the SI, including its factor structure, validity, and diagnostic predictive ability.

Main Methods:

• The Scrupulosity Inventory (SI) was administered to 150 undergraduate students, alongside measures of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and perfectionism.
• Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed on the SI.
• Convergent and divergent validity were assessed, and the SI's ability to predict categorical diagnoses of scrupulosity was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.

Main Results:

• A confirmatory bifactor model demonstrated a strong general scrupulosity factor and specific factors for Personal Violations, Ritualized Behavior, Interference with Life, and Problem Pervasiveness.
• The SI showed strong convergence with the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity (PIOS) and moderate convergence with the Perfectionism Inventory (PI) and Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS).
• The SI demonstrated superior predictive accuracy for scrupulosity diagnoses (AUC = 0.84) compared to the PIOS (AUC = 0.75) and YBOCS (AUC = 0.69).

Conclusions:

• The Scrupulosity Inventory (SI) is a psychometrically sound tool for measuring scrupulosity symptom severity.
• Scrupulosity and OCD appear to have distinct clinical presentations, suggesting the SI can help differentiate these conditions.