Decision-Making Skills and Heterosocial Competence in College Women: An Information-Processing Analysis

Abstract

The Inventory of Decisions, Evaluations, and Actions (IDEA) was developed to assess interpersonal problem-solving skills in college women. It consists of 40 items depicting a range of heterosocial problem situations commonly faced by college women, along with item-specific rating criteria based on college men's judgments or response effectiveness. As predicted, subjects with high IDEA scores differed from those with low IDEA scores on several theoretically derived subscales aimed at assessing subcomponents of decision making within McFall's social information-processing model of competence.