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 Summary of Commitment Measures
Posted by: Carolyn Hafer
Title/Position: Professor
School/Organization: Brock University
Sent to listserv of: SPSP
Date posted: June 5th, 2005


Hi colleagues,

Some time ago, we asked for suggestions for measures of individual differences in general commitment to or fear of committing to particular decisions or a particular course of action. Following is a summary of the responses we received for anybody who is interested.
Thanks for all your help!

Carolyn Hafer,
Brock University

Specific measures suggested:

Maslach's "individuation scale", which assesses people's willingness to publically commit to issues/actions. {Maslach, C., Stapp, J., & Santee, R. T. (1985). Individuation: conceptual analysis and assessment. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 49, 729-738.}

A measure of judgemental self-doubt (given that, if you do not trust your own judgment, you may also have trouble committing). {Mirels, H. L., Greblo, P., and Dean, J. B. (2002). Judgemental self-doubt: beliefs about one's judgmental prowess. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 741-758.}

Personal fear of invalidity, needs for structure or closure, or other scales from the epistemic motives area (e.g., 1990s work by Kruglanski, Neuberg et al., Thompson et al.). Or the opposite fear of leaving things ambiguous and open-ended

Developmental measure of fear of commitment. {Serling, D. A., and Betz, N. E. (1990). Development and evaluation of a measure of fear of commitment. Journal of Counselling Psychology, 37, 91-97.}

Other more general sources that were suggested:

1. Phil Brickman's " Commitement, conflict, and caring" (1989) book
2. The attachment literature
3. Searching for antonyms (e.g., assertiveness, decision-making style).

Finally, there were also several very interesting comments on the nature of the question we were asking that we won’t summarize here, but that were quite useful for us, so thanks to everyone!



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