Refining a Measure of Appraisal Style

Abstract

The following study addresses creating a new, more efficient measure for evaluating appraisal styles, specifically emotion-focused, or accommodative-focused, coping potential and problem-focused coping potential. The current measure, the Appraisal Style Questionnaire is considerably reliable and valid, yet its length precedes its usage in practical settings. We aimed to create this measure, administer it along with the old measure and select validating measures to collect data, which we then utilized for validity and reliability checks. We had three main expectations: the first of which was that the new scales of Accommodative-focused coping potential (AFCP) and Problem-focused coping potential (PFCP) will correlate appropriately with each other and their analogous ASQ counterparts, which results show occurred with significance. The second expectation for our new measure was that it would show significant correlations with other validating measures. Our last expectations was that our new scales would maintain unique relationships with those validating measures when controlled for the opposing component, and these unique relationships would mimic the old ASQ components’ unique relationships. Results show that in fact our new measure correlated with the validating measures and maintained those correlations when being controlled, to an extent more so than the old ASQ and with stronger correlations.