Development of an inventory to measure psychosexual development.

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The present inventory, the Psychosexual Stager Inventory (PSI) was developed over a period of 3 yr. Items were initially obtained from a survey of psychoanalytic literature and submitted to six judges, psychologists and psychiatrists intimately familiar with psychoanalytic theory. Judges classified items according to the stage of development from wh~ch they were derived. Items were selected for a preliminary form when four or more judges agreed. Item analysis using total scale scores as the criterion was performed and ~tems which failed to discriminate were eliminated. New items were added and the judges again rated the total pool of items. This second rating followed the first by 1 yr. and reliabilities were calculated (2). The resultant revision was administered to a hererogeneous group of college students, psychiatric in-patients and minor surgery patients. Item analysis was again applied and the present form of the PSI obtained. The present form of the PSI is, then, the result of a process of adding and deleting items based on the dual criteria of expert judgments and statistical item analysis. It has separate forms for males (68 items) and females (67 items) with the present set of norms based on the heterogeneous sample. For each item, S rates the statement from +3, very much like me, to -3, very much not like me. The items and format are such that the test may be used with persons with an eighth-grade education and with all psychiatric patients except those whose intellectual functioning would be considered severely disrupted. Correlational analysis of scale scores indicates a magnitude and direction of relationship consistent with expectations derived from psychoanalytic theory. A preliminary analysis of test-retest reliability over a 3-wk. period on a small sample (N = 32) of males suggests that the PSI is a reliable instrument (reliability coefficients: oral =