Adult Temperament Questionnaire: Validity and Reliability Studies

Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, there is not any questionnaire in Turkish measuring adult temperament that could be used both with the community as well as with clinical samples. Thus, the purpose of the study was to translate The Adult Temperament Questionnaire-Short Form (ATQ, Evans and Rothbart, 2007), which has already been translated into several languages, to Turkish and to examine the reliability and validity of the Turkish version. The Adult Temperament Questionnaire was translated into Turkish through translation and back-translation method. The questionnaire was distributed to 462 university students and adults who were from different socioeconomic statuses and professions in Ankara. The age of participants ranged from 18 to 65 years and the mean of their ages was 22.97 years. In addition, 274 (%59.3) of them were females, 188 (%40.7) of them were males. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to examine construct validity, and also internal consistency reliabilities were calculated. Five factors, namely Impulsive Negative Affect (α = .77), Sensory Sensitive Negative Affect (α = .80), Extraversion (α =.75), Effortful Control (α =.75), and Sensitivity (α =.83), were extracted after exploratory factor analysis like in the original scale. Impulsive Negative Affect includes frustration and inhibitory control; Sensory Sensitive Negative Affect includes discomfort and high-intensity pleasure; Extraversion includes positive affect and sociability; Effortful Control includes attentional control and activation control; and Sensitivity includes general perceptual sensitivity, associative perceptual sensitivity, affective perceptual sensitivity, and sadness. Internal consistency coefficients range from .60 to .79. The correlations between the factors of temperament scale and personality traits were significant and ranged from .19 to .59. The current findings suggest that acceptable levels of reliability and validity were exhibited by The Adult Temperament Questionnaire-Turkish version. Thus, this scale can be used with Turkish samples.