The Comrey personality scales in Russian: A study of concurrent, predictive, and external validity

Abstract

This study was a follow-up to Brief and Comrey (1993; Journal of Personality Assessment, 60, 267–284) in which the stability of the factor structure of the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS) was investigated for a diverse, Russian sample. Results from that study showed that Comrey's 8-factor personality taxonomy generalized well to the Russian sample and that the CPS dimensions for the Russians were not significantly different from the dimensions reported in samples from six Western nations. The purpose of our study was to investigate further the appropriateness of using the CPS with Russian respondents by looking at the construct and external validity of the CPS scales. On the basis of a priori hypotheses, CPS scale scores were correlated with scores from a number of other personality measures and biographical data. In addition, planned comparisons were performed (a) between groups of communists and non-communists, (b) among persons holding conservative, reformist, and revolutionary perspectives concerning the need for societal change, and (c) among high school, undergraduate, and graduate groups. Results showed for the Russian respondents good support for the construct validity of the scales: Trust, Orderliness, Social Conformity, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Masculinity, and Response Bias. The Activity and Empathy scales received only moderate support due mainly to the lack of suitable criterion variables with which to correlate them.