Effects of Adaptation Level, Context and Face Validity on Responses to Self-Report Psychological Inventories

Abstract

The Adaptation Level or contrast and context effects as conceived by Helson on self-report questionnaires was investigated using the Addiction Research Center Inventory, MMPI, and CPI on overlapping items. The absence of contrast or context effects suggests that the point of reference or determinant for a response to a self-report or personality question for a group is determined by the item itself and is unaffected by adjacent items or by items as a whole. Significant individual differences were found for a contrast tendency, indexed by scoring reversals of responses to adjacent items, irrespective of the selection of adjacent items, but the generality of the reversal tendency, as evaluated by correlations across tests, was a function of the degree of dissimilarity of adjacent items. The reversal tendency based on a change of response to dissimilar items accounts for as much variation across tests as social desirability or response set. These tendencies appear to be overestimated in each test, since they account for much more variation within tests than across tests.