A scale for assessing psychological reactance proneness: Reliability and validity

Abstract

The development of a 30 item self-report measure to assess proneness to experiencing psychological reactance is reported. Reactance is the motivational state that arises in response to threats to behavioral freedoms; reactance stimulates efforts to preserve or restore the threatened freedoms. Community college students completed preliminary and final versions of the Reactance Proneness Inventory (RPI), as well as a number of measures of related behaviors and personality variables, in order to establish its convergent and divergent validity. The RPI showed excellent internal consistency (alpha =.90) and test-retest reliability (.89), and satisfactory convergent-divergent validity. Two existing measures of reactance proneness, the Therapeutic Reactance Scale (Dowd, Milne, & Wise, 1984) and Hong Reactance Scale (Hong & Page, 1989) were also included in the validation process. Associations of the reactance proneness measures with measures of personality variables and problem behaviors were lower than anticipated; possible explanations for these finding are discussed. Clinical applications and research implications of reactance proneness are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.