Abstract:
The Children's Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) is a standardized personality measure for children ages 8-12. It was designed to help educators identify children in need of special help, to increase the accuracy of estimates of scholastic promise and creativity, to assess candidates for scholarships, to aid school and occupational counselors as they guide individuals towards a career, and to measure the success of treatment programs on troubled children. The questionnaire targets 14 dimensions of personality taken from a factor analysis of personality performed by Cattell in 1950. Each form contains 140 items, ten for each dimension. To reduce error caused by deliberately false responses, the items were written to be as neutral as possible with regard to social desirability, and items with low face validity were used so that children might not know how to make themselves "look good". Test-retest reliability after a one-week interval for each of the 14 factors on the various test forms ranges from .28-.87 with most coefficients hovering around .50. The Kuder-Richardson Formula 21 shows internal consistencies ranging from .32-.86 with a clustering in the .70s. Between-forms reliability shows that forms A and B are more equivalent than forms C and D and that using two forms of the test rather than one increases its reliability. Validity was established in several ways. A group of under-achieving school children of average intelligence registered a tendency towards high anxiety as measured by the CPQ. High-achieving students had higher scores on emotional stability, venturesomeness, and self-confidence. No actual correlation coefficients are reported in the test manual, however. Another study compared the CPQ scores of children who had been referred for counseling for nervous personality disorders with scores of normal children and found that the referred children's scores showed sub-average dominance and surgency, and above-average individualism, tender-mindedness, guilt-proneness, and introversion. Furthermore, delinquent boys were found to be significantly more dominant, tough-minded, excitable, cold and aloof, and individualistic. Actual coefficients are available from the sources listed in the bibliography of the test manual. The questionnaire is administered without a time limit and can be broken up into two sessions if desired. Answer sheets can be machine-scored by the publisher or hand-scored by the test administrator. Scores are presented as normalized stens, standard deviation stens, and percentile ranks. Because several personality factors have significantly different means between boys and girls, different norms are applied to the two groups.