The original 240 VIA-IS
items were 10 items per scale,
except 11 for Valor and 9 for Hope/Optimism.
Goldberg and Bel Bahar
initially reduced these based on a
method of maximizing reliability by removing items where doing so would
improve
the Cronbach alpha coefficient.
After this process, when
scale still alpha under .70, they
added non-VIA IPIP items that had been administered alongside (in the
same
mailed questionnaire) the VIA items.
The scale scores for VIA
posted in Harvard Dataverse (under
PPQ – Perceptions of Personal Qualities) involve scales that
incorporated seven
non-VIA items, which had been included in the scales for Integrity,
Self-Regulation, and Prudence. To yield the scale scores posted there,
214
items were scored on the 24 scales.
In contrast, the VIA scoring provided on the IPIP website uses 213 items to score the 24 scales, and not seven but 12 non-VIA items were used to do so. These posted scoring keys reflect a slightly later iteration of scale revision (done, like all scale-revision work, during June and July of 2005) with respect to the Prudence, Citizenship/Teamwork, and Equity/Fairness scales. In these later revisions, one Prudence item was removed, two original VIA items scored on Equity were replaced with two non-VIA items, and three original VIA items scored on Citizenship were replaced with three non-VIA items.
Thus, the data available publicly on the Harvard Dataverse reflects
scoring that is slightly closer to the original VIA scoring than is
found in the scoring keys available here at the IPIP website. The difference is not
great
however: Out of the 214 items scored to produce publicly available
data, 208
are included among the 213 items to be scored if following the scoring
keys at
the IPIP website.
Return to the VIA
Scoring Key Page