L'Échelle des Orientations Générales à la Causalité: Validation canadienne française du General Causality Orientations Scale.

Abstract

Although for many years self-determination and intrinsic motivation were studied from an experimental perspective, only recently have they been considered from a personality perspective. A psychometric scale that has been shown to be important in that regard is the General Causality Orientations Scale (GCOS) (Deci & Ryan, 1985b), which was based on Deci and Ryan's (1985a) self-determination theory. There are three rather stable orientations toward the initiation and regulation of behaviour — the autonomy, the control, and the impersonal orientations. The autonomy orientation describes the extent to which people initiate and regulate their behaviour through choice and self-determined goals; the control orientation describes the extent to which people's behaviour is initiated or regulated by controlling inputs; and the impersonal orientation characterizes the extent to which people tend to be nonintentional because they believe they are ineffective in reliably attaining desired outcomes. The GCOS measures the extent to which people are oriented in each of these three ways. Deci and Ryan (1985b) have shown that the scale possesses reliability and validity. The purpose of this study was to 14 VALLERAND, LACOUTURE, BLAIS & DECI validate a French version of the GCOS. The French version was obtained through back-translation and committee procedures (Brislin, Lonner, & Thomdike, 1973), and then psychometric properties and construct validity of the scale were assessed by attempting to reproduce some of the findings reported by Deci and Ryan (1985b) in their validation study. In general, results obtained with the French version of the GCOS were similar to those obtained with the English version and represent an important first step toward the cultural equivalence of the French-Canadian version of the instrument.