The Spheres of Control scale: the identification of a clear replicable three-factor structure
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 354 students at Victoria University of Wellington who were seated in public places around the University Campus. All participants received a wrapped sweet as a token of appreciation for taking part in the study.
Materials
The questionnaires used in this study consisted of the SOC-1 (Paulhus & Christie, 1981) and the SOC-3 (Paulhus & Van Selst, 1990). With the SOC-1, participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they disagreed or agreed with each statement on a seven-point scale
Study 2: the replication study
Cattell, Balcar, Horn and Nesselroade (1969) reasoned that the derivation of a particular factor solution from one sample is not sufficient to demonstrate the underlying factor structure of a questionnaire. Rather, if the pattern of loadings on the rotated factors is to be relied upon, then the solution should be robust across separate administrations of the questionnaire.
In this second study, a confirmatory factor analysis was undertaken, using the responses of a substantial, independent group
Discussion
The present investigation was concerned with the factor structure of the SOC scale in general, and in particular the factor structure of the most recent version of the SOC scale (SOC-3). Previous research has examined the factor structure of earlier versions of this scale (e.g. Paulhus and Christie, 1981, Paulhus, 1983), but no published research has yet examined the relative fit between the theoretically proposed factors of the SOC-1, the SOC-3 and those indicated by analysis of the data.
The
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