Validity of an Intuitive Personality Scale: Personal Responsibility as a Predictor of Academic Achievement

Fifty undergraduate students (27 female, 23 male) completed measures of verbal intelligence and locus of control, together with the Responsibility scale of the California Psychological Inventory and a student-written scale of Personal Responsibility. On the basis of correlational and multiple-regression analyses, it was found that Intelligence and Personal Responsibility were jointly the most efficient predictors of a subject's mean course grade, and that the latter was the best single predictor. These results add further support to Jackson's (1971) contention that naive item writers can create personality scales of equivalent or greater validity than more formal empirically-derived scales.