Bryant Self Concept Survey (BSCS)

Abstract

The Bryant Self Concept Survey (BSCS) is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument designed to measure self-concept dimensions among developmentally disabled adults. Developed by Janis L. Bryant in 1979 at California State University, Northridge, the instrument emerged in response to a significant methodological void: established self-concept inventories—such as the Tennessee Self Concept Scale and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale—imposed cognitive, linguistic, and psychometric demands that exceeded the functional capacities of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The BSCS consists of 30 brief declarative statements divided symmetrically across three primary domains of personal identity: Social Self (10 items), Physical Self (10 items), and Family Self (10 items).

To accommodate respondents with varied reading proficiencies and abstract reasoning limitations, the BSCS employs a simplified dichotomous (True/False) response format. This design minimizes cognitive fatigue, attenuates extreme-response stylistic variance, and facilitates direct or interviewer-assisted administration. Psychometric investigations reported in the foundational validation literature indicate adequate internal consistency, with Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) coefficients ranging from .76 to .84 across subscales and reaching .88 for the total composite score. Test-retest reliability across two-week intervals demonstrates temporal stability (r = .81 to .86). Construct and content validity were substantiated through expert panels, behavioral ratings by rehabilitation staff, and factor analytic verification. The BSCS remains an important clinical and research tool for rehabilitation counselors, clinical psychologists, and disability researchers seeking an accessible, multidimensional index of subjective self-evaluation in adult populations with cognitive impairments.

Keywords

Bryant Self Concept Survey, BSCS, self-concept assessment, developmental disabilities, intellectual disability, social self, physical self, family self, psychometrics, dichotomous rating scale, adaptive functioning, disability assessment

Authors

The Bryant Self Concept Survey was conceived and standardized by Janis L. Bryant as part of a graduate research initiative within the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). The foundational development and initial empirical validation of the instrument were published in Bryant’s master’s thesis entitled “A Self-Concept Scale for the Developmentally Disabled Adult” (1979), supervised by faculty specialists in special education, psychological measurement, and vocational rehabilitation.

Bryant’s work was motivated by direct observations in sheltered workshops, day habilitation centers, and residential community settings, where standard psychometric tools consistently failed to capture the self-referential phenomenology of adults with intellectual challenges. Correspondence and archival records regarding the instrument are preserved within the institutional repository of California State University, Northridge (CSUN ScholarWorks).

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Bryant Self Concept Survey is to provide a standardized, clinically viable, and psychometrically rigorous measure of self-perceived identity and subjective well-being in adults diagnosed with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Historically, individuals categorized under developmental disabilities—encompassing intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, autism spectrum conditions, and acquired neurological impairments manifesting during developmental stages—were either systematically excluded from self-report psychometric research or subjected to instruments characterized by excessive linguistic complexity, complex conditional clauses, and sophisticated multi-point Likert scales.

Overcoming Methodological Barriers in Special Populations

Standard psychological measurement instruments frequently presuppose an intact capacity for abstract introspection, metalinguistic awareness, and the calibration of graduated scalar responses (e.g., distinguishing between “agree” and “strongly agree”). For adults with mild-to-moderate intellectual deficits, five- or seven-point Likert formats routinely induce response biases such as acquiescence bias, central tendency bias, or random categorical selection driven by cognitive frustration. The BSCS addresses these obstacles by adopting simple sentence structures, concrete vocabulary, and a binary forced-choice paradigm (True vs. False). This format minimizes the cognitive burden associated with complex decision-making heuristics while preserving the capacity to detect genuine affective and self-evaluative variance.

Clinical and Habilitation Applications

In clinical, vocational, and residential habilitation environments, the BSCS serves multiple diagnostic and evaluative functions:

• Individualized Program Planning (IPP): Identifying specific domains where an individual experiences feelings of social alienation, body dissatisfaction, or familial detachment, thereby directing psychological and social work interventions toward targeted areas of subjective distress.
• Outcome Assessment in Community Integration: Evaluating changes in self-esteem and identity integration following transitions from institutional or highly sheltered settings to independent living, supported employment, or integrated community programs.
• Counseling and Psychotherapy: Providing counselors with an accessible baseline profile of an individual’s personal self-worth, peer relationships, and perceived familial support, serving as a non-threatening springboard for therapeutic discourse.
• Empirical Research: Serving as an objective, quantitative dependent variable in empirical studies evaluating social-skills training, physical fitness programs, and vocational rehabilitation initiatives for adults with special needs.

Psychological Construct

The BSCS conceptualizes self-concept as a multidimensional, hierarchical construct comprising an individual’s conscious beliefs, evaluations, perceptions, and attitudes regarding their own attributes, capacities, social roles, and somatic presence. Rather than treating self-esteem as a global, undifferentiated psychological trait, Bryant adopted a differentiated structural model that parses self-referent appraisal into three operational dimensions highly salient to the developmental disability community: Social Self, Physical Self, and Family Self.

1. Social Self

The Social Self subscale (Items 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28) captures the respondent’s perceived interpersonal competence, sociability, emotional resilience in peer settings, and perceived acceptance by non-familial others. For developmentally disabled adults, social interactions are often fraught with experiences of stigmatization, ostracism, or paternalistic marginalization. This subscale measures both positive affiliation (e.g., Item 1: “I am a friendly person”; Item 22: “I tell others my likes and dislikes”) and social vulnerability or rejection sensitivity (e.g., Item 16: “When I’m criticized, I feel bad for days”; Item 25: “I feel that if I behaved like I want to, others wouldn’t like me”). It also evaluates assertiveness and autonomy in friendships, such as the capacity to establish personal boundaries (Item 28: “I find it hard to say ‘no’ to friends”).

2. Physical Self

The Physical Self subscale (Items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29) evaluates the individual’s bodily satisfaction, somatic health appraisal, body image, and self-conception regarding sexuality and romantic attractiveness. Historical clinical traditions frequently depersonalized or desexualized adults with developmental disabilities, overlooking their physical identity and somatic self-worth. Bryant explicitly countered this oversight by incorporating items addressing physical attractiveness, mirror avoidance, and sexuality:

• Body Image and Somatic Acceptance: Evaluated through items examining satisfaction with physical appearance (Item 2: “I like my looks the way they are”), dysmorphic distress or weight-related concerns (Item 5: “I am too fat or too skinny”; Item 20: “I would like to change the looks of certain parts my body”), and mirror aversion (Item 11: “I do not like to look into mirrors”).
• Sexuality and Attractiveness: Evaluated through direct indicators of perceived sexual appeal and comfort with sexuality (Item 8: “I enjoy having others think I am sexy”; Item 17: “I really like having sex”; Item 26: “I feel others are attracted to me”).
• General Vitality and Self-Care: Evaluated via self-rated health and basic personal regard (Item 14: “I am not a healthy person”; Item 23: “I like myself”; Item 29: “I care about myself”).

3. Family Self

The Family Self subscale (Items 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30) measures the respondent’s feelings of belonging, safety, mutual trust, and emotional alignment within their primary family unit. Because adults with intellectual and developmental impairments frequently remain dependent on or closely interconnected with their families of origin throughout adulthood, family dynamics exert a disproportionate influence on their self-concept:

• Perceived Support and Security: Captured by statements evaluating safety nets in times of adversity (Item 6: “I have a family that would help me in any kind of trouble”; Item 24: “I am a member of a happy family”).
• Familial Alienation and Conflict: Captured by items indexing interpersonal friction, perceived rejection, or mistrust (Item 12: “I argue a lot with my family”; Item 18: “I am not loved by my family”; Item 30: “I feel my family doesn’t trust me”).
• Autonomy versus Conformity: Investigating the tension between compliance with family expectations and personal independence (Item 21: “I often go along with my family when I’d really not like to”; Item 27: “I do not act as my family expects me to”).

Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the Bryant Self Concept Survey draws upon three prominent theoretical pillars: William H. Fitts’ multidimensional framework of self-concept, Carl Rogers’ Humanistic Theory of Personality, and Symbolic Interactionism, integrated within the context of Wolf Wolfensberger’s Normalization Principle.

Fitts’ Multidimensional Self-Concept Model

Bryant explicitly modeled the structural taxonomy of the BSCS upon the internal/external dimensions formulated by William H. Fitts in the development of the Tennessee Self Concept Scale (TSCS). Fitts postulated that self-concept is organized along an internal frame of reference (the identity self, the judging self, and the behavioral self) interacting across external thematic fields: physical self, moral-ethical self, personal self, family self, and social self. Recognizing that the full 100-item matrix of the TSCS was too demanding for developmentally disabled adults, Bryant adapted Fitts’ three most pragmatically distinct domains—Social, Physical, and Family—retaining Fitts’ construct definitions while adjusting item linguistics to accommodate lower cognitive thresholds.

Rogerian Phenomenological Theory

From Rogerian person-centered psychology, the BSCS derives its fundamental premise: human behavior is guided by the individual’s subjective phenomenal field and conscious self-concept rather than solely by external contingencies or objective observer evaluations. Rogers posited that psychological adjustment is a function of congruence between the perceived self and the ideal self, mediated by unconditional positive regard. In populations with developmental disabilities, institutional environments historically privileged behavioral compliance over phenomenological experience. The BSCS re-centers the individual’s subjective agency, asserting that developmentally disabled adults possess an internal self-representation that can be systematically quantified and respected.

Symbolic Interactionism and the Looking-Glass Self

The theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism—anchored by Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the “looking-glass self” and George Herbert Mead’s formulation of the “generalized other”—is directly reflected across the BSCS items. Cooley posited that an individual’s self-concept is constructed through a three-stage reflexive process: imagining how one appears to others, imagining the judgment of that appearance, and experiencing an emotional self-feeling (such as pride or shame). The BSCS operationalizes this through items measuring external appraisal (e.g., Item 3: “My friends trust me”; Item 8: “I enjoy having others think I am sexy”; Item 25: “I feel that if I behaved like I want to, others wouldn’t like me”).

Normalization and Social Role Valorization

During the late 1970s, the field of developmental disabilities experienced a paradigm shift led by Wolf Wolfensberger’s conceptualization of normalization and social role valorization. This principle dictated that persons with disabilities should be granted access to life conditions, personal dignity, and developmental experiences equivalent to those available to the general population. The BSCS integrated this philosophy by addressing adult concerns—including sexuality, adult independence, and personal boundaries—treating the respondent as a developing adult rather than perpetuating the infantilizing clinical assumptions common in earlier psychometric assessments.

Validity

Psychometric validation of the Bryant Self Concept Survey followed standard classical test theory (CTT) methodologies to establish content, construct, and criterion-related validity within the target population of developmentally disabled adults.

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was established through a multi-stage review process involving an expert panel of special education educators, vocational rehabilitation supervisors, sheltered workshop staff, and licensed clinical psychologists. The initial pool of candidate items was screened against stringent readability criteria, eliminating complex compound sentences, figurative language, double negatives, and polysemous terms. Items were reviewed to confirm that they comprehensively sampled the behavioral and affective markers of social engagement, bodily perception, and family interactions relevant to adults living in supervised community or independent residential settings.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was evaluated by examining correlations between the BSCS subscales and established psychometric benchmarks, as well as collateral observational ratings:

• Correlations with the Tennessee Self Concept Scale (TSCS): In a subgroup capable of completing simplified portions of the TSCS, convergent validity coefficients were moderate to strong. The BSCS Social Self subscale correlated positively with the TSCS Social Self score (r = .64, p < .001); the BSCS Physical Self subscale correlated with the TSCS Physical Self score (r = .59, p < .01); and the Family Self subscale demonstrated a concordant relationship with the TSCS Family Self dimension (r = .68, p < .001).
• Behavioral Staff Ratings: Significant positive correlations were established between the BSCS Social Self scale and standardized counselor ratings of peer sociability, cooperative group work, and assertiveness in rehabilitation settings (r = .48 to .56, p < .01).
• Discriminant Validity: The BSCS exhibited negligible and statistically non-significant correlations with overall Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores (r = .08 to .14), demonstrating that the instrument measures an affective-evaluative self-appraisal construct independent of cognitive aptitude.

Reliability

Given the binary (True/False) response architecture of the BSCS, traditional internal consistency was evaluated primarily through Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20), alongside stability analyses using test-retest correlations.

Internal Consistency

In the primary normative and validation cohorts of developmentally disabled adults, internal consistency analyses yielded reliable metric stability across the scale:

• Total Scale Composite (30 items): KR-20 coefficients ranged from .84 to .88, indicating strong overall measurement reliability for a dichotomous instrument in this clinical demographic.
• Social Self Subscale (10 items): KR-20 yielded a coefficient of .79.
• Physical Self Subscale (10 items): KR-20 yielded a coefficient of .76.
• Family Self Subscale (10 items): KR-20 yielded a coefficient of .82.

Item-total correlations across the subscales revealed that nearly all items correlated positively with their respective subscale composites, with corrected item-total r values generally falling between .32 and .58.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability was examined by re-administering the BSCS to a sample of sheltered workshop participants over a two-week interval under standardized conditions. The stability coefficients demonstrated good test-retest reliability:

• Total Score: r = .86 (p < .001)
• Social Self: r = .81
• Physical Self: r = .83
• Family Self: r = .84

These findings indicate that despite potential day-to-day fluctuations in environmental stressors within specialized work and residential facilities, the underlying self-concept dimensions measured by the BSCS remain stable over short intervals.

Factor Analysis

Bryant conducted an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to evaluate whether the empirical structure of the 30-item questionnaire aligned with the hypothesized three-factor model (Social Self, Physical Self, and Family Self).

Factor Extraction and Rotation Procedures

Using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) followed by orthogonal Varimax rotation, three primary factors were extracted based on Kaiser’s eigenvalue-greater-than-one criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and visual examination of the scree plot. Together, these three latent factors accounted for approximately 42.6% of the total variance across the item pool, a typical outcome for dichotomous personality and self-concept measures in heterogeneous clinical samples.

Factor Loadings and Structural Alignment

• Factor 1 (Family Self): Accounted for the largest proportion of common variance (~17.8%). Items 6, 12, 18, 24, and 30 demonstrated strong primary factor loadings ranging from .49 to .73. This factor distinctly captured perceived family cohesion, trust, and perceived familial alienation.
• Factor 2 (Social Self): Accounted for ~13.4% of the variance. Items 1, 4, 10, 16, 22, and 25 loaded primarily onto this factor (loadings from .42 to .68). These items indexed interpersonal ease, sensitivity to peer criticism, and social self-efficacy.
• Factor 3 (Physical Self): Accounted for ~11.4% of the variance. Items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 20 loaded primarily on this somatic dimension (loadings from .39 to .71). Items regarding mirror avoidance, body satisfaction, and sexuality coalesced effectively into this physical-attractiveness construct.

A small number of evaluative items (e.g., Item 9: “I can always take care of myself in any situation”; Item 23: “I like myself”) exhibited minor cross-loadings across Factor 1 and Factor 2, reflecting their broader connection to global self-efficacy and overall self-esteem. Nonetheless, the empirical factor solution provided substantial support for the tripartite theoretical categorization proposed by Bryant.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Bryant Self Concept Survey (BSCS)
• Author: Janis L. Bryant (1979)
• Assessment Type: Structured self-report personality/self-concept questionnaire (interviewer-assisted administration permissible).
• Target Population: Developmentally and intellectually disabled adults, individuals in vocational rehabilitation, sheltered workshops, and supported living environments.
• Total Item Count: 30 items.
• Subscale Allocation:
  • Social Self: 10 items (Items 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28)
  • Physical Self: 10 items (Items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29)
  • Family Self: 10 items (Items 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30)
• Response Scale: Dichotomous forced-choice format: True / False.
• Administration Modality:
  • Self-Administered: Suitable for individuals possessing at least a third- to fourth-grade functional reading capability.
  • Oral Interviewer-Assisted: The administrator reads each statement aloud verbatim without editorial elaboration, recording the respondent’s verbal, gestural, or pointing response.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Each item is scored directionally, with 1 point assigned for responses reflecting positive self-concept and 0 points assigned for responses reflecting negative self-concept.
  • Positively Phrased Items: Endorsement (“True”) receives 1 point; rejection (“False”) receives 0 points (e.g., Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29).
  • Negatively Phrased (Reverse-Scored) Items: Endorsement (“True”) receives 0 points; rejection (“False”) receives 1 point (e.g., Items 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30).
  • Subscale Scores: Range from 0 to 10 points per subscale.
  • Total Composite Score: Sum of all subscales, ranging from 0 to 30 points, with higher scores reflecting more positive self-concept and psychological adjustment.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Bryant Self Concept Survey was published in 1979 as part of Janis L. Bryant’s master’s thesis at California State University, Northridge. As an academic master’s thesis preserved in institutional library archives, the instrument was made available for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scholarly research purposes.

Researchers and clinicians wishing to utilize or reproduce the BSCS may access the complete master’s thesis through the institutional repository of California State University, Northridge (CSUN ScholarWorks). No licensing fees or formal commercial royalties are required for academic and clinical research use, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and standard academic citations are maintained in all subsequent publications and reports.

References

• Bryant, J. L. (1979). A self-concept scale for the developmentally disabled adult (Master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge). CSUN ScholarWorks. http://scholarworks.csun.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/123721/BryantJanis1979.pdf?sequence=1
• Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
• Fitts, W. H. (1965). Tennessee Self-Concept Scale: Manual. Counselor Recordings and Tests.
• Marsh, H. W., & Shavelson, R. (1985). Self-concept: Its multifaceted, hierarchical structure. Educational Psychologist, 20(3), 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2003_1
• Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. University of Chicago Press.
• Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications, and theory. Houghton Mifflin.
• Wolfensberger, W. (1972). The principle of normalization in human services. National Institute on Mental Retardation.

Items of the Scale