An Analysis of Two Response Styles: True Responding and Item Endorsement 1

A true or false response to an item like dquo;I usually help old ladies across the street,dquo; is clearly the result of a variety of deter-minants. In this case, the respondent may in fact usually help old ladies across the street, and be high on a nurturance dimension. However, he may also tend (a) to manifest a general tendency to respond true to test items, (b) to endorse test items as descriptive of himself, and (c) to respond consistently in a desirable or an un-desirable direction. In other words, his response may be deter-mined by the substance or content of the item, as well as by aspects of its form, such as ambiguity and salience, positive as opposed to negative wording, and desirability scale value. The effects of such aspects of item form, interacting with subject characteristics and manifesting themselves as response styles (Jackson and Mes-sick, 1958, 1962), were the primary focus of the present investiga-tion. A major aim of this study was to distinguish clearly between two interpretations of acquiescence response style. Initially, acquies-cence was defined as a response set which manifests itself primarily in the tendency to respond true to test items (Lentz, 1938; Cron-bach, 1942). In these earliest papers, little attention was directed