Brief method for assessing social-personal orientation

This study reports the development of a brief measure of the construct “social-personal orientation” (SPO), defined as a tendency to define one's self-concept primarily in terms of social experiences of in terms independent of social relationships. Choices of “social” or “personal” terms on a 30-item adjective checklist were stable and internally consistent in three samples of college students. Evidence on construct validity of the measure was obtained from responses of 88 males and 75 females to the Carlson Adjective Checklist and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Predicted sex differences and relationships of SPO to Sensation-Intuition and Thinking-Feeling type scores on the MBTI were confirmed at the .001 level.