Type A behaviour and psychological androgyny among Greek college students

Research conducted primarily in the United States suggests that the combination of Type A behaviour, high instrumentality, and low expressiveness may place individuals at relatively high risk for coronary‐artery and heart disease. The present research investigates the trans‐societal generalizability of the structure, reliability, relationships among, and distributional characteristics of these measures for 117 college students in Athens, Greece. As hypothesized, the Greek students were significantly less instrumental and less expressive than the American students, and scored significantly higher on the measure of Type A. Although there were significant mean differences between these samples, the results suggest that many of the interscale relationships are comparable, supporting an etic (universal) interpretation of the findings. Nevertheless, the results suggested several emic (unique) characteristics of these measures and their interrelationships.

Perceptions of leadership traits: comparison of adolescent and adult school leaders

This study compares the responses of 58 adolescent and 58 adult school leaders on the Leadership Traits Inventory. Adolescent leaders rank integrity, good listening, and knowledge or skills highest and rank compassion, consistency, and flexibility lowest. Adult leaders, in comparison, rank sense of purpose, integrity, and knowledge or skills highest and rank flexibility, compassion, and creativity lowest. Rank-order differences between the groups are significant. Adolescent leaders rank good listening and creativity significantly higher than adult leaders. Adults rank sense of purpose, consistency, and flexibility significantly higher than adolescents. Moreover, adolescent school leaders tended to be girls. The results are viewed in terms of leadership qualities, gender, and the developmental differences between adolescents and adults.

Androgyny and Sex-Typing as Continuous Independent Factors, and a Glimpse of the Future

Models for operationalizing the sex-role constructs androgyny and sex-typing are reviewed, and problems discussed. A new (principal components) model representing an exact solution is derived and shown to solve existing problems. In this model, androgyny is a function of the sum of standardized instrumentality and expressiveness scores, and sex-typing a function of the difference between these scores. Formal operationalization of these constructs reveals that they may have theoretical utility in only very contrived contingencies, and an alternative profile matching model is proposed. This latter theory, which is not yet fully specified, hypothesizes that an individual's performance is maximized when the critical operating characteristics of a contingency (i.e., instrumental and expressive behaviors required for maximal performance to result) exactly match the individual's specific instrumental and expressive predispositions, and that performance decreases as the discrepancy between the instrumental/expressive profiles of the individual and the contingency increases.

Psychological androgyny and preference for intubation in a hypothetical case of end-stage lung disease

Psychological androgyny theory (PAT) was employed as a model of the interpersonal (social) and task activities required of physicians for care of their patients. According to PAT, individuals with a large repertoire of task and social skills ("androgynous" individuals) should be optimally adaptable to contingencies reflecting varying combinations of task and social challenges. The authors examined the relationship between androgyny and preference for intubation on a patient management problem involving end-stage lung disease for 67 general internists and internal medicine housestaff from two hospitals. Results revealed a negative relationship between androgyny and preference for intubation, suggesting that androgynous and nonandrogynous physicians respond differently to complex and difficult decision-making tasks. Indirect evidence is offered to suggest that this response reflects a general tendency to utilize fewer health care resources. Discussion focuses on the need to improve the precision of measurement of these latent constructs.

A note on measurement issues in type A research: let's not throw out the baby with the bath water

It has been suggested that researchers rely exclusively on the structured interview (SI) to assess Type A behavior instead of using objective self-report measures, because the SI is the only prospectively validated instrument currently available. This article considers the costs and benefits of relying solely on the SI to measure Type A behavior. Although using only the SI would assure that researchers measure, in a relatively unobtrusive fashion, actual Type A behaviors known to be predictive of heart disease, it would dramatically increase research costs, impede longitudinal studies of changes in Type A behavior, reduce the validity of statistical conclusions, restrict the convergent and discriminant validity of the Type A construct, and ultimately inhibit our ability to improve accuracy in predicting heart disease. A set of recommendations is proposed for improving the quality of measurement in Type A research.

Norms for College Undergraduates for the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the Wiggins Interpersonal Behavior Circle

Norms based on large random samples of introductory psychology college students are presented for the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (N = 1,133) and the Wiggins Interpersonal Behavior Circle (N = 564). The use of normative data, as compared with raw data or data standardized separately within studies, should result in more precise and meaningful measurement of subjects' locations on sex-role dimensions (i.e., instrumentality and expressiveness) by future researchers using these instruments, although norms should be updated to reflect future research results. Conventional definitions of moderately extreme and statistically extreme scores are presented for these instruments based on these norms, encouraging standardization of sample characteristics of future studies.