Question

Discuss the different types of validity that have been employed—whether implicitly or explicitly to validate the life position scale. It is ideal therefore to read articles in chronological order starting with the A Life Position Scale, Life Positions and Attachment: A Canonical Correlation Analysis, and Life Positions Scale Language Equivalence, Reliability and Validity Analysis.

Answer 1

Different types of validity are:

(i) External Validity

External validity is about generalization: To what extent can an effect in research, be generalized to populations, settings, treatment variables, and measurement variables?

External validity is usually split into two distinct types, population validity and ecological validity and they are both essential elements in judging the strength of an experimental design.

(a) Population Validity

Population validity is a type of external validity which describes how well the sample used can be extrapolated to a population as a whole.

It evaluates whether the sample population represents the entire population, and also whether the sampling method is acceptable.

For example, an educational study that looked at a single school could not be generalized to cover children at every US school.

On the other hand, a federally appointed study, that tested every pupil of a certain age group, will have exceptionally strong population validity.

Due to time and cost restraints, most studies lie somewhere between these two extremes, and researchers pay extreme attention to their sampling techniques.

Experienced scientists ensure that their sample groups are as representative as possible, striving to use random selection rather than convenience sampling.

(b) Ecological Validity

Ecological validity is a type of external validity which looks at the testing environment and determines how much it influences behavior.

In the school test example, if the pupils are used to regular testing, then the ecological validity is high because the testing process is unlikely to affect behavior.

On the other hand, taking each child out of class and testing them individually, in an isolated room, will dramatically lower ecological validity. The child may be nervous, ill at ease and is unlikely to perform in the same way as they would in a classroom.

Generalization becomes difficult, as the experiment does not resemble the real world situation.

(ii) Internal Validity

Internal validity is a measure which ensures that a researcher's experiment design closely follows the principle of cause and effect.

Test Validity

Test validity is an indicator of how much meaning can be placed upon a set of test results.

Criterion Validity

Criterion Validity assesses whether a test reflects a certain set of abilities.

• Concurrent validity measures the test against a benchmark test and high correlation indicates that the test has strong criterion validity.

• Predictive validity is a measure of how well a test predicts abilities. It involves testing a group of subjects for a certain construct and then comparing them with results obtained at some point in the future.

Content Validity

Content validity is the estimate of how much a measure represents every single element of a construct.

Construct Validity

Construct validity defines how well a test or experiment measures up to its claims. A test designed to measure depression must only measure that particular construct, not closely related ideals such as anxiety or stress.

• Convergent validity tests that constructs that are expected to be related are, in fact, related.

• Discriminant validity tests that constructs that should have no relationship do, in fact, not have any relationship. (also referred to as divergent validity)

Face Validity

Face validity is a measure of how representative a research project is ‘at face value,' and whether it appears to be a good project.

Describing the construction of a life position scale (Boholst, 2002), a factor analytic procedure came up with two factors—one neatly containing all the I items and the other all the U items. At the later part of the article a question was asked regarding the clustering of the I/U items and why the items were not “those regarding a sense of OKness and not-OKness.” (p.31-32). It was suggested at the end of the article that the resolution to such an issue might shed light on the developmental aspects of TA in the context of a person’s differentiation or individuation.

Our efforts to clarify these issues led us to the written literature on attachment theory—most of which trace their theoretical bases to Bowlby’s (1973/1980/1982) writings. As a psychoanalyst who was influenced by the object relations theory and who also took insights from other scientific fields such as ethology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology (Levy, Blatt, & Shaver, 1998), Bowlby posited that children’s early attachment experiences with caregivers, significantly impact on and serve as a model for their later relationships. These early attachment interactions provide a stable and fundamental model of feelings and thoughts pertaining to children’s sense of self-worth and interpersonal trust (Bowlby, 1973). These fundamental feelings and thoughts about self and others take form as mental representations and become internalized prototypes or models of self and models of others—both of which could either be positive or negative depending on the nature of the children’s previous interactions with attachment figures or caregivers. If caregivers treat children with respect, support, and provide reliable nurturance, children would develop positive models of the self and of the other. If, on the other hand, caregivers are unresponsive to children’s needs or if children are given care inconsistently and treated abusively, negative models of self and other are likely to develop.

Attachment theory has been very well researched and elaborated based on more than a thousand empirical papers. Typologies of attachment such as those of Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) have classified infants as securely attached, anxious-ambivalent, or avoidant. These attachment types have also been argued to be observable among adolescents and adults—in the context of romantic and marital relationships (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Furthermore, children’s attachment categorizations can even be predicted (with 80% accuracy) based on their parent’s description of their own interactions with their parents (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). As an important aside, this should provide strong support for the scripting process in the transactional analysis literature.

A four-category model of attachment styles was later proposed by Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) who argued that attachment could be classified into four (and not three) basic styles or prototypes of attachment. What picked our interest was that the attachment categories they described seem to have a one-to-one correspondence with Berne’s (1962, 1972) life positions. The secure attachment style for instance describes adult individuals who have a sense of lovability about themselves and that others will be accepting and responsive. This essentially describes the first life position in the TA literature—I’m OK—You’re OK or I+U+. Preoccupied attachment style describes individuals who view themselves negatively but other people positively. This is strikingly similar to the depressive’s position or I’m not OK—You’re OK (I-U+). Adults with the dismissing style of attachment view themselves in a positive light and others with suspicion as in I’m OK—You’re not OK (I+U-). Lastly, individuals with the fearful attachment style view themselves and others negatively as in I’m not OK—You’re not OK or I-U-. Attachment styles with negative models of either self or others were found to be associated with particular patterns of interpersonal problems. This finding also seems congruent to Boholst’s (2003) doctoral dissertation that found reliable effects of the “not OK” life positions on certain psychopathologies and positive mental health variables.

The present study

This research hoped to verify whether life positions might be viewed as attachment prototypes or if these two constructs are basically independent. It is hypothesized that the attachment prototypes described by Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) have parallels with the four life positions originally described by Berne in 1962. This is an important issue that needs to be addressed because life positions as a construct has not captured the same interest among researchers in the field as attachment has and consequently has not amassed the empirical evidence desired by the present researchers. Instead, one sees the proliferation of variations and elaboration of the life positions construct—all of which are intuitively plausible and may even be clinically verifiable but without the harness of operational definitions, the guidance good measurement theory, and the validation of replicable empirical evidence. If the attachment measures can statistically account for a reliable and considerable portion of life positions then we may gain some insights about the latter construct by looking into the advancements made by attachment research. On the other hand, and who knows, we might catch the attention of attachment researchers and they could also look into both the past and the current theorizing on life positions and use them to shed light on their own research paths in attachment.

The English form of Life Positions Scale has been translated to Turkish by the researchers with the help of two instructors from the department of English. In order to evaluate the translation and to develop the tryout form of --their English equivalents were assessed by two proficient assistant professors working at the department of Guidance and Psychological Counseling. Then the Turkish form was again translated to English by two instructors from the department of English Education. The tryout form was given to 53 students from Faculty of Education at items for incomprehensible ones. The final Turkish form was translated back to English again, and Boholst, the owner of the scale, was asked to assess the compatibility of this culturally-adapted scale with his own. Upon cale were applied with one-week interval to 61 students from the faculty of English Education in order to determine the linguistic equivalence of the scale. The correlation between these two applications (.79 p<.05) has been taken as the criteria of linguistic equivalence. For the item distinctiveness of the Life Positions Scale, item test correlations and 27% extreme group comparisons have been made. The calculation of item test correlation has been determined according to the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient; while for the 27% extreme group comparison the t test has been used. For the reliability of the scale, internal consistency and test-retest reliability studies have been conducted with 140 students from various departments of Faculty of these students twice with a 15-day interval, and the correlation between the data gathered from two applications (.81 p<.05) has been taken as the test-retest reliability coefficient. For the validity studies of the scale, construct and concurrent validity have been examined. For the construct validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses have been made. The scale to determine the concurrent validity has been compared with the data from the original developed by Boholst. The variance ratios and eigenvalues the data from the original scale explores have been covered together with those the Turkish scale explores. The result has been taken as concurrent validity. For the estimation of the reliability and validity of the inventory, the softwares SPSS 15.0 and Lisrel 8.51 have been used.