Everyday sadism: psychometric properties of three Spanish versions for assessing the construct

Abstract

Everyday sadism refers to the non-clinical personality trait of sadism, someone who obtains pleasure from inflicting pain or from the suffer of other people. This construct, in the recent years, has attracted more attention to researches, conducting to the development of different measures to assess it. With a sample of N = 2160 we studied the psychometric properties of three everyday sadism scales, the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (SISS), the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (CAST), and the Assessment of Sadistic Personality (ASP). For the three scales we found (1) good reliability coefficients, (2) adequate fit for the factor structure theorized for each of the measures, (3) significant gender differences in the trait, where males obtain higher scores than females in all the instruments, and (4) negative correlations with the HEXACO super traits excluding openness and positive with the Dark Triad traits. We concluded that the psychometric properties of the Spanish versions of the SISS, CAST and ASP present good psychometric values in line with the original measures and previous translations.