Weinberger Adjustment Inventory (WAI) - Collateral Follow-up

This measure appears in the following time-points: Collat12, Collat24, Collat36.

Related Construct

Psychological Development

Description of Measure

The Weinberger Adjustment Inventory (WAI; Weinberger & Schwartz, 1990) is an assessment of an individual's social-emotional adjustment within the context of external constraints. There are 4 subscales: Impulse control (e.g., "X says the first thing that comes into his/her mind without thinking enough about it".), suppression of aggression (e.g. "People who get X angry better watch out".), consideration of others ( e.g., "Doing things to help other people is more important to X than almost anything else".) and temperance. The measure asks the collateral to rank how much (1= False to 5= True) the subject's behavior in the past year matches a series of statements. Higher scores on each of the subscales delineated below indicate more positive behavior (i.e. more impulse control, greater temperance and greater consideration for others).

Four computed scores are available:

Impulse control [c#impuls]; the mean of 8 items which comprise the scale. Seven of the eight items are reverse coded. Data must be contained in six of the eight items in order to receive a computed mean.
Suppression of aggression [c#supagg]; the mean of 7 items which comprise the score. Each item is reverse scored.. Data in five of the seven items is required.
Consideration of others [c#consid]; the mean of 6 items which comprise the score. Data in four of the six items is required.
Temperance [c#temper]; calculated by combining the 15 items from the impulse control and suppression of aggression subscales. The score represents the mean of these 15 items. Data in 12 of the 15 items is required.

Higher scores indicate more positive behavior (i.e. more impulse control, greater temperance and greater consideration for others).

There are a total of 23 items in the WAI, however, only 21 are considered in the scores above. Item 6 (c#collat2_wai6 "X can do things as well as other people can") is not used because factor analysis suggested that it did not fit with the other items in the scale, while item 1 (doing things to help people is more important to me than almost anything else) is not used because it was not felt that a collateral could accurately answer this question.

Data Issues

Item c#collat2_Wai1 ("Doing things to help people is more important to me than almost anything else") was not included in the consideration of others subscale because it was felt the collateral reporter could not accurately answer this question. This item was therefore removed from the syntax to compute the consideration of others subscale for the collateral data. However, this item does remain part of the computation for the subject baseline and subject follow-up versions of this subscale.

References

Weinberger, D.A., and Schwartz, G.E. (1990). Distress and restraint as superordinate dimensions of self-reported adjustment: a typological perspective. Journal of Personality, 58(2), 381-417.
Weinberger, D. A., Feldman, S. S., Ford, M. E., & Chastain, R. L. (1987). (1989). Construct validity of the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory. Unpublished manuscript. Other Reference(s): Farrell, A. D., Danish, S. J., & Howard, C. W. (1992). Risk factors for drug use in urban adolescents: Identification and cross-validation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 20 (3), 263-286.
Feldman, S. S., & Weinberger, D. A. (1994). Self-restraint as a mediator of family influences on boys' delinquent behavior: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 65 (1), 195-211.