Source
Deci and Ryan (1985), LIT-1955, Journal of Research in Personality 19, 109–134, read in NOTE-1531.
What was actually shown
The instrument. Twelve vignettes, each with an autonomy, a control and an impersonal response rated 1–7, summed into three 12–84 subscales; built from 96 items by factor analysis, five items rewritten “to improve their loadings” (pp. 117–118). Scores are levels within a person, not types (p. 113).
Reliability. α (n = 636) .744, .694, .741; each item correlates with its own subscale (means .48–.52) more than with any other (highest mean .147), with no overlap of the two distributions; retest over two months (n = 51) .749, .711, .778 (pp. 118–119, Table 1).
Structure. A–C r = .034; A–I −.248; C–I .273 (n = 636, p. 119). The autonomy and control orientations are not poles of one dimension.
Validity, correlational. Table 2 (p. 120): A with supporting children’s autonomy .55 (n = 51), ego development .43 (n = 42), self-esteem .35; I with Rotter’s external control .52, social anxiety .58, self-esteem −.61, depression .28 (n = 87); C with Type-A .26, public self-consciousness .22; none with social desirability. Behaviour (pp. 126–128): C with exam grades −.25 (n = 88); fairness ratings and maternal attachment patterns at p < .07 and p = .06.
This could have come out otherwise: the autonomy and control subscales could have been strongly negatively related, as two ends of a continuum, and the impersonal scale could have tracked nothing beyond Rotter.
What this does not say
- That orientations cause behaviour or outcomes. All results are correlations; the behavioural ones are weak by the authors’ own account (“the behavioral relationships were the least strong”, p. 130).
- That orientations parallel informational, controlling and amotivating events. Hypothesized (p. 113); the paper’s evidence for it is the pattern of correlations and an unpublished interaction (Kernis 1983).
- That every prediction held. The paper says “All of the predicted relationships appeared” (p. 123); control with ego development (−.22, n = 42) was not significant and impersonal did not predict grades.
- What the scale’s items are. It is not printed.
Connections
- THEORY-049. A person-side source of an event’s functional significance: the same reward can be informational to the autonomy-oriented and controlling to the control-oriented, so a test of THEORY-049 should measure or randomize orientation.
- THEORY-054. The paper’s reason for renaming “internal” as “autonomy” is that inner events like “I have to do that to feel worthwhile” act as controls (p. 111): heteronomy inside the person, THEORY-054’s “Not order” half, in 1985.