Assessment of Personality Priorities: first psychometric data

Abstract

The four personality priorities (superiority, control, pleasing, comfort) are based on Adlerian Psychology and represent the individual’s preferred strategy to pursue belonging and significance in their lives and their way of understanding themselves, others, and life. This paper presents the first psychometric results of the adaptation into Spanish of the Adlerian Personality Priorities Assessment, a 30-item instrument that evaluates the four priorities. Using two samples of 50 and 359 adults, one for the pilot study and one to assess the psychometric properties of the scale, the results reproduce the original structure of four factors with good reliability values. Regarding the evidence of validity related to other variables, the priorities control and superiority showed positive correlations with indicators of well-being and achievement, and negative correlations with agreeableness. Comfort and pleasing were negatively associated with satisfaction with life and extraversion, while comfort correlated negatively with conscientiousness. All priorities presented negative correlations with emotional stability. The adapted questionnaire shows sufficiently good psychometric properties to warrant its use in future studies. In addition, the personality priorities construct presents some interesting implications, since the Big Five personality factors and indicators of well-being, used to study concurrent validity, differentiate well between them.