Personal Self-Activation Inventory: an Experience of Item Response Theory Application

Personal self-activation inventory that measures a psychological construct reflecting person’s internal voluntary activity is considered in the article. The inventory includes three components (scales): independence, physical activation and psychological activation. In the framework of the Item Response Theory (IRT), the model of graded responses was applied. It is shown that all questions of the inventory have the discriminability not lower than moderate. The graphs of the information function for each scale indicate that the measurements of the self-activation components are fairly accurate in the range from low values to values significantly higher than the mean, and only the highest values (exceeding the mean by two standard deviations or more) are not measured accurately. A moderate positive correlation between self-activation and the average grade can serve as verification of the inventory criterion validity. Discriminant validity estimation, which was carried out by calculating correlations with other similar constructs (self-control, personal dynamism, hardiness), showed that hardiness is the most similar to self-activation construct. Incremental validity estimation has shown that when self-activation is added to the prediction model of performance based on personal resources, the variance explained is increased much more than by adding hardiness. This indicates that the self-activation construct has some incremental validity and reflects a psychological reality that is different from the construct of hardiness.

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