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The l0-item Student Personal Responsibility Scale (SPRS-10) was developed to assess students' acceptance of personal responsibility in their day-to-day living. The scale showed an acceptable level of internal consistency and positive correlations to the Conscientiousness Scale of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R), academic performance, self-esteem, and retention.
Lack of personal responsibility is considered one of the main causes of American school failure (Hwang, 1995). Different researchers have used different terms for responsibility (Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, & Doherty, 1994; Wolfe & Johnson, 1995). In order to provide a coherent framework, Schlenker et al. (1994) proposed a Triangular Model of Responsibility in which responsibility is described as the combined strength of the three elements: prescriptions (rules for conduct), events (units of action), and identity (actor's roles, qualities, commitments, and pretensions). According to this model, personal responsibility is likened to a psychological highway that engages the self-system and increases determination to accomplish prescribed goals. Following this reasoning, it was expected that, if the prescriptions for the student's identity were highly internalized, then the personal responsibility would be high, which might relate to an event of a high grade point average (GPA) effecting a positive self-evaluation, which, in turn, might be related to high self-esteem.
The existing measures of responsibility were examined and found to be either part of comprehensive personality inventories or irrelevant to student life. Only one study used a measure, Personal Responsibility (PR) Scale, which was more appropriate for college students (Martel, Mckelvie, & Standing, 1987). However, the sample size was small and the scale had 30 items. The authors attempted to develop a shorter, area-specific scale to measure student personal responsibility by using a larger sample. Two studies to achieve this goal are described below.
METHOD
PARTICIPANTS
The participating undergraduates, between 18 and 26 years of age, (pilot study N = 52; second study N = 281) were obtained from the psychology department subject pool at an American regional southwestern university. A 3-year follow-up was conducted with the second study participants to check on their enrollment status. The sample consisted of 60% women, 72% of whom were Caucasian, 75% freshmen and sophomore, and 90% single with Mage = 19.9 (SD = 1.9).
MEASURES TO TEST VALIDITY
A well established scale...