The reliability and construct validity of two measures of addictive personality

Gossop and Eysenck developed a subscale of the EPQ that discriminates between drug addicts in treatment and nonaddicts. They called this scale the Addiction Scale (AS). Previously, MacAndrew developed an Alcoholism Scale (MAC) by comparing alcoholics and nonalcoholic psychiatric patients' responses on the MMPI. In the present report both scales were completed by 615 men and 642 women as part of the Winnipeg Health and Drinking Survey, a longitudinal study of personality and health. The reliability of both scales is quite low, .64 for the AS and .57 for the MAC. Correlations with other personality measures indicate that the MAC is more associated with extraversion-related characteristics whereas the AS is more associated with neuroticism-related factors. The AS was not associated with the level of smoking, and the MAC was correlated with smoking for men only. Both scales were significantly correlated with various drinking measures, and the correlations were slightly higher for the MAC.