editors in seeking to provide systematic reviews of high quality instruments. Measures of Personality and Social
Psychological Attitudes was enormously successful in providing a concise compendium of a broad range of scales
and measures that were extremely useful for social-personality research and assessment. However, it is now
more than two decades since this volume was published, so it is time to produce a completely revised and
updated resource for researchers and practitioners alike. In addition, the landscape of assessment in personality
and social psychology is very different from that in 1991, and we briefly introduce this volume with an overview
of some of the key developments that have impacted assessment methods since that time. The original title has
been broadened to encompass, Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs , thereby allowing inclu-
sion of a considerably wider range of key topics, in a major expansion from 12 chapters in the 1991 version, to no
fewer than 26 substantive chapters in the present volume. An examination of the most often cited areas of
research and professional need, and more frequently used measures in the current social-personality literature
further guided our selection of the chapters covered in this book.
We first provide an account of the evaluative criteria which guided the reviews of each of the scales/measures,
followed by a brief overview of the contents for each of the chapters that follow.
Systematic Frameworks for Personality Assessment
While major personality models and theories and accompanying personality inventories such as Cattell’s Sixteen
Personality Questionnaire (16 PF), the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R), and the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS)
dominated the psychological literature throughout much of the last century (see Cattell & Meade, 2008 ;Comrey,
2008;Eysenck & Barrett, 2013 ;Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985 ), converging lines of evidence from psychometrics, behavior
genetics, longitudinal studies and cross-cultural research have contributed to the current popularity of various ver-
sions of the Five Factor Model or FFM (e.g., McAdams & Pals, 2006 ;McCrae & Costa, 2008 ;Poropat, 2009 ). At the same
time, there have been significant challenges to the FFM, including alternate systems (e.g., Ashton & Lee, 2008 ;Block,
1995, 2001 ;Boyle, 2008 ;Cattell, 1995 ;Eysenck, 1991, 1992 ). As Piekkola (2011) pointed out:
‘According to this approach there are five underlying structural factors common to all people and independent of cultural influences /C0
an asocial, ahistorical, biologically based conception. Examination of the theory finds it to be dealing with traits of temperament rather
than personality and judges it insufficient on that basis. Rather than conceiving of personality as fixed and universal, it is argued that
personality is an adaptation worked out in the cultural and historical context of the individual life.’ Piekkola (2011, p. 2)
Moreover, broad factors necessarily fail to capture much of the normal personality trait variance, let alone the
abnormal trait variance ( Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988 ). Indeed, use of multiple lower-order or ‘primary’ personality
scales has been shown to improve predictive validity ( Paunonen & Ashton, 2001 ). The present volume aims to
highlight measures of a range of social-personality constructs that are more narrowly defined than those of the
FFM and other broad factors.
Social-personality research and assessment requires multivariate models, whether these are drawn from com-
plex theoretical models describing direct and indirect (mediational or moderating) influences, empirical evidence,
case studies, or the clinician’s experience and capacity to create heuristic descriptions to guide intervention and
preventive actions. As the measures reviewed in the current volume demonstrate, social-personality measures
have become increasingly integrated within mainstream disciplines of psychology including psychophysiology,
cognitive neuroscience, and cross-cultural psychology ( Boyle, Matthews, & Saklofske, 2008a,b; Matthews et al.,
2009; Saklofske & Zeidner, 1995 ), although some doubts have been expressed over the extent to which integration
is possible ( Cervone, 2008 ). One source for optimism comes from evidence that core concepts in personality and
social psychology may sometimes ‘interact’ in various ways that present a larger and more complete picture of
cause, pathway, and effect models. Renewed attention to advancing theory, and the development of new statisti-
cal techniques for analyzing large data sets (e.g., multilevel confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation
modeling; Rowe, 2003 ) have led to a slow but steady advance ( Roberts et al., 2007 ), whether those processes are
neurologically based or traced to social-cognitive influences. In turn, theoretical progress raises the bar for con-
struct validation in scale development. The onus is on researchers to establish a case for interpreting psychomet-
ric scores in terms of process-based theory.
Theoretical insight and empirical evidence is accompanied by practical application. For example, occupational
psychology has moved on from its historical roots towards a more measured appreciation of the benefits and
limitations of systematic personality assessment. A series of meta-analyses of social-personality measures as
predictors of various occupational outcomes has played an important role in this process (e.g., Swider &
Zimmerman, 2010 ).5 AIMS AND ORIGINS OF THIS VOLUME
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT