A New Measure of the Rogerian Schema of the Good Listener

Abstract

Sustainable social relationships can be produced by good listening. Good listening may be exhibited by people who endorse Carl Rogers’s schema of good listening; a set of beliefs about what constitutes high-quality listening. To measure it, in Study One, we constructed 46 items. In Study Two, we administered them to 476 participants and discovered three factors: belief that listening can help the speaker, trusting the ability of the speaker to benefit from listening, and endorsing behaviors constituting good listening. These results suggested a reduced 27-item scale. In Study Three, we translated the items to Hebrew and probed some difficulties found in the last factor. In Study Four, we administered this scale in Hebrew to a sample of 50 romantic couples, replicated the factorial structure found in Study Two, and showed that it predicts the partner’s listening experience. In Study Five, we administered this scale to 190 romantic couples, replicated Study Four, and obtained evidence for test–retest reliability and construct validity. In Study Six, we obtained, from the same couples of Study Five, eight months after measuring their listening schema, measures of relationship sustainability—commitment, trust, and resilience. We found that the listening schema of one romantic partner predicts the relationship sustainability reported by the other romantic partner and showed incremental validity over the listener’s self-reported listening. This work contributes to understanding the essence of good listening, its measurement, and its implications for sustainable relationships.