Index of Adjustment and Values (IAV)

Abstract

The Index of Adjustment and Values (IAV), developed by Robert E. Bills, Edgar L. Vance, and Orison S. McLean in 1951, represents a landmark psychometric instrument designed to operationalize phenomenological self-concept theory. Grounded in the humanistic framework of Carl Rogers and the perceptual psychology of Donald Snygg and Arthur W. Combs, the IAV was constructed to systematically quantify three critical facets of the human self-system: the Perceived Self (Self-Concept), the degree of Self-Acceptance, and the Ideal Self. Administered via a standardized roster of 49 carefully selected trait adjectives derived from Allport and Odbert’s trait lexicon, the scale requires respondents to evaluate each trait across three parallel continuous dimensions: (1) descriptive applicability to the current self, (2) emotional acceptance or valence toward possessing that trait, and (3) aspirational frequency or desired level of the trait. By comparing these simultaneous evaluations, the instrument yields discrete subscale metrics alongside a vital mathematical derivative: the Self-Ideal Discrepancy Score, historically utilized as a direct metric of psychological adjustment, neurosis, and personal integration. Extensive psychometric evaluations over several decades have demonstrated split-half and test-retest reliability estimates frequently exceeding .80 to .90 across diverse demographic groups, alongside profound convergent validity with established personality inventories such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and Rogerian Q-sort assessments. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the IAV’s theoretical foundations, structural and psychometric properties, factor-analytic evidence, clinical and organizational utility, administration and scoring protocols, and complete authentic item inventory.

Keywords

Index of Adjustment and Values, IAV, Robert E. Bills, Self-Concept, Self-Acceptance, Ideal Self, Self-Discrepancy Theory, Phenomenological Psychology, Humanistic Assessment, Adjustment Measurement, Carl Rogers, Self-Actualization

Authors

The Index of Adjustment and Values was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of clinical and research psychologists at the University of Kentucky and the University of Alabama:

• Robert E. Bills, Ed.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky; later Dean of the College of Education and Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama. Dr. Bills was a nationally recognized pioneer in phenomenological psychology, student-centered educational climates, and quantitative self-concept measurement.
• Edgar L. Vance, M.A. — Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky. Vance contributed extensively to the initial psychometric standardization, trait adjective selection, and normative data collection on university cohorts.
• Orison S. McLean, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky; clinical psychologist specializing in personality assessment, psychotherapy process research, and projective-objective test congruency.

Purpose

During the early 1950s, psychological assessment was heavily polarized between clinical projective techniques (such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and Thematic Apperception Test) and early psychometric trait inventories focused primarily on psychiatric symptomatology. Emerging phenomenological and client-centered theoretical paradigms lacked standardized, psychometrically rigorous, objective self-report instruments capable of measuring the inner phenomenal world of the individual as experienced and articulated by the self.

The primary purpose of the Index of Adjustment and Values was to bridge this methodological divide. Bills, Vance, and McLean sought to devise a rapid, structured, and objective instrument that could assess how an individual perceives themselves, how satisfied they are with those perceptions, and how their self-perceptions compare to their internal standards of personal worth. Specifically, the instrument was engineered to:

• Operationalize Phenomenological Adjustment: Provide a direct, quantifiable reflection of psychological adjustment based on the perceived congruence between who one believes they are (Perceived Self) and who one aspires to be (Ideal Self), alongside one’s affective self-attitudes (Self-Acceptance).
• Facilitate Psychotherapy Process and Outcome Research: Offer humanistic, Rogerian, and psychodynamic clinicians a reliable metric to track therapeutic progress. Therapeutic gains in client-centered therapy are classically operationalized as an increase in self-acceptance and a reduction in self-ideal discrepancy; the IAV was designed specifically to measure these shifts over time.
• Support Educational and Developmental Investigations: Enable educational researchers to evaluate the psychological well-being, self-worth, and peer-perceived adjustment of students across secondary and tertiary academic environments, illuminating the relationship between self-attitudes, academic achievement, and social behavior.
• Enable Industrial and Organizational Research: Assess worker morale, managerial effectiveness, and vocational adjustment by measuring personal values and perceived congruence within professional roles, establishing how discrepancies between actual performance and aspirational standards influence workplace satisfaction and emotional stability.

Psychological Construct

The Index of Adjustment and Values assesses a multidimensional psychological construct anchored in the phenomenological self-system. The instrument separates the holistic self-concept into three operationalized dimensions assessed concurrently across identical trait descriptors, supplemented by a derived relational construct:

1. The Perceived Self (Column I: Self-Concept)

The Perceived Self represents an individual’s cognitive description of their ongoing behavioral tendencies, competencies, and character traits. It addresses the fundamental introspective question: “How much of the time is this trait descriptive of me?” Rather than measuring objective behavioral reality, it captures the phenomenological truth of the individual — their subjective representation of who they are in daily life. For instance, endorsing traits such as “competent,” “calm,” or “fearful” on this dimension reflects the individual’s baseline cognitive appraisal of their habitual functioning across situations.

2. Self-Acceptance (Column II: Affective Evaluation)

Distinct from the descriptive self-concept, Self-Acceptance measures the emotional valence, approval, or dissatisfaction the individual attaches to their perceived characteristics. It operationalizes the core evaluative query: “How do I feel about being the way I am in this respect?” An individual may recognize that they are “ambitious” or “reckless” most of the time (Column I), yet experience profound pride, neutral indifference, or intense self-loathing regarding that perceived trait. Bills emphasized that self-acceptance is not merely a cognitive acknowledgment of traits, but an affective affirmation of one’s personal identity. High self-acceptance indicates unconditional positive self-regard and emotional comfort with one’s perceived strengths and limitations.

3. The Ideal Self (Column III: Aspirational Values)

The Ideal Self embodies the internalized value system, ego ideal, and aspirational standard toward which the individual strives. It investigates: “How much of the time would I like this trait to be characteristic of me?” This dimension reflects the internalized moral, societal, and personal expectations that define personal excellence for the respondent. It provides the teleological direction of the personality, serving as the benchmark against which the perceived self is continuously evaluated.

4. Self-Ideal Discrepancy (Derived Construct: Personal Adjustment)

The mathematical absolute divergence between the Perceived Self (Column I) and the Ideal Self (Column III) constitutes the Self-Ideal Discrepancy Score. In Bills’ psychometric framework, this discrepancy represents a primary index of psychological adjustment or neurosis. A moderate discrepancy is considered normative and adaptive, reflecting healthy motivation toward self-improvement and personal growth. Conversely, extreme discrepancies signify intense self-alienation, perceived failure, demoralization, and elevated vulnerability to anxiety and depression. Conversely, an artificially suppressed discrepancy (where perceived self equals ideal self across all traits) frequently denotes psychological defensiveness, rigidity, or lack of critical self-awareness.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the IAV is primarily anchored in the Client-Centered Personality Theory formulated by Carl R. Rogers (1951), alongside the phenomenological foundations established by Donald Snygg and Arthur W. Combs (1949), and Prescott Lecky’s theory of self-consistency (1945).

Phenomenological Field Theory

Phenomenology posits that human behavior is determined not by external stimuli or unconscious drives operating in isolation, but by the individual’s subjective perceptual field — the phenomenal field. As Snygg and Combs asserted, an individual acts in accordance with how they perceive reality at any given moment, with the self-concept occupying the central organizing nucleus of that field. Bills, Vance, and McLean adopted this tenet as the foundational premise of the IAV: to understand and predict human adjustment, one must measure the perceptual field of the person directly from their internal frame of reference.

Rogerian Self-Actualization and Incongruence

According to Rogers’ personality theory, every organism possesses an inherent drive toward self-actualization — the realization of its capacities and potentials. However, as the self-concept differentiates, the need for positive regard emerges. When individuals internalize “conditions of worth” imposed by significant others, a rift develops between the experiencing organism and the perceived self. When the perceived self is incongruent with the ideal self, anxiety ensues, prompting psychological defenses such as distortion or denial. The IAV was intentionally structured to provide a clear, operational measurement of this Rogerian incongruence. Bills hypothesized that individuals demonstrating high self-acceptance and minimal discrepancy between their perceived and ideal selves would exhibit superior emotional stability, social maturity, and openness to experience.

Allport’s Trait Lexicography

To ground the phenomenological constructs in observable linguistic representations, Bills and colleagues drew directly from Gordon W. Allport and Henry S. Odbert’s monumental 1936 psycholexical catalog of 17,953 personality-descriptive terms. From an initial pool of over one hundred commonly used evaluative words, the authors conducted item-selection studies to extract 49 balanced adjectives representing broad behavioral dispositions, social virtues, intellectual capabilities, and emotional traits easily understood by high school and college-educated individuals.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Index of Adjustment and Values has been corroborated through numerous empirical studies spanning clinical, educational, and industrial settings.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In their seminal 1951 validation study, Bills, Vance, and McLean administered the IAV alongside established measures of psychological health to university students. Self-acceptance scores (Column II) exhibited strong, statistically significant inverse correlations with psychopathology indices on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), specifically demonstrating robust negative relationships with the Depression (D), Psychasthenia (Pt), and Schizophrenia (Sc) clinical scales ($r = -.45$ to $-.62$, $p < .001$). Individuals with high self-acceptance exhibited significantly fewer neurotic signs and lower somatic complaints.

Furthermore, convergent validity was confirmed against Rogerian Q-sort methodologies. In comparative trials conducted during psychotherapy outcome evaluations, changes in the IAV Self-Ideal Discrepancy score correlated strongly ($r = .71$) with Stephenson’s Q-technique self-ideal correlation coefficients, indicating that the computationally simpler IAV yielded equivalent clinical sensitivity to laborious card-sorting procedures.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The predictive validity of the IAV has been established across diverse behavioral and institutional criteria:

• Academic and Intellectual Achievement: Bills (1956) demonstrated that college students categorized as “high self-accepting” on the IAV achieved higher grade point averages and demonstrated greater academic persistence than students with comparable intellectual ability (measured via the American Council on Education Psychological Examination) who were characterized by low self-acceptance and elevated self-ideal discrepancies.
• Interpersonal Perception and Social Acceptance: In sociometric investigations, individuals with high self-acceptance scores were rated significantly more favorably by their peers in group discussions, demonstrated greater social empathy, and exhibited lower levels of ethnocentrism and interpersonal dogmatism.
• Occupational Morale and Performance: Lefkowitz (1967) deployed the IAV to evaluate the self-esteem of industrial workers, demonstrating that high self-acceptance and self-ideal congruence reliably predicted job satisfaction, supervisor ratings of competence, and reduced workplace absenteeism.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity studies have consistently indicated that while the IAV is moderately related to social desirability inventories (e.g., the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, $r \approx .30$ to $.42$), it maintains distinct empirical variance from general cognitive intelligence, socioeconomic status, and short-term situational mood fluctuations, confirming its utility as a measure of enduring self-structure rather than transient state affect.

Reliability

The reliability of the Index of Adjustment and Values has been evaluated extensively across multiple testing modalities, including test-retest stability and split-half internal consistency.

Test-Retest Stability

In the original normative investigations by Bills et al. (1951), test-retest reliability was evaluated by administering the IAV to cohorts of undergraduate students with intervals ranging from six weeks to sixty days. The resulting temporal stability coefficients demonstrated remarkable consistency across all three primary dimensions:

• Column I (Perceived Self): Test-retest reliability coefficient $r_{tt} = .90$
• Column II (Self-Acceptance): Test-retest reliability coefficient $r_{tt} = .88$
• Column III (Ideal Self): Test-retest reliability coefficient $r_{tt} = .92$
• Self-Ideal Discrepancy (|Col I − Col III|): Test-retest reliability coefficient $r_{tt} = .83$

These values demonstrate that an individual’s phenomenal self-concept, affective self-evaluation, and ideal standards represent highly stable cognitive-affective personality structures over time.

Internal Consistency and Split-Half Reliability

Using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula on odd-even split-half reliability divisions, Bills (1956) reported internal consistency coefficients ranging from $.86$ to $.93$ across adult and college samples for the composite dimensions. Later investigations utilizing Cronbach’s alpha have consistently confirmed high internal consistency, with alpha coefficients typically falling between $.87$ and $.94$ for Column I, $.89$ and $.95$ for Column II, and $.91$ and $.96$ for Column III across diverse adult and adolescent populations.

Factor Analysis

Although the IAV was designed primarily as a three-dimensional triadic instrument evaluated across 49 distinct traits, multiple factor-analytic investigations have scrutinized the latent factor structure governing the 49 adjectives within each column.

Latent Dimensionality of the Trait Lexicon

Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) employing principal component analysis with Varimax orthogonal and Promax oblique rotations have repeatedly indicated that the 49 adjectives do not represent a single undifferentiated global factor, but rather resolve into four to six prominent latent dimensions of personality appraisal:

• Factor 1: Social Competence & Interpersonal Warmth: Highly loaded by items such as friendly, considerate, kind, tactful, helpful, and democratic. This factor captures communal integration and interpersonal relational success.
• Factor 2: Emotional Stability & Poise: Marked by positive loadings on calm, poised, stable, and negative loadings on fearful, nervous, and reckless. This factor reflects internal equilibrium, resilience to stress, and self-regulation.
• Factor 3: Agency, Conscientiousness & Efficiency: Anchored by accurate, competent, efficient, dependable, purposeful, responsible, and business-like. This factor accounts for instrumental capability and vocational efficacy.
• Factor 4: Intellectance & Openness: Loaded significantly by clever, intellectual, logical, studious, broad-minded, and teachable, measuring perceived cognitive sophistication.
• Factor 5: Hostility / Negative Interpersonal Valence (Inverted): Defined by items such as annoying, cruel, meddlesome, sarcastic, stubborn, and fault-finding. These traits reflect antisocial or disruptive behaviors that exhibit high discrepancy scores among well-adjusted respondents.

Structural Invariance

Confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) studies examining cross-sample invariance have affirmed that this multi-factor configuration remains structurally invariant across gender and educational strata. However, researchers have noted that Column II (Self-Acceptance) exhibits a far stronger primary general evaluative factor (“General Self-Regard”) than Columns I and III, demonstrating that emotional self-acceptance functions as an overarching affective filter through which specific trait appraisals are integrated.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Index of Adjustment and Values (IAV)
• Authors: Robert E. Bills, Edgar L. Vance, and Orison S. McLean (1951, 1956)
• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report rating scale / Phenomenological personality inventory
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult populations (requires approximately an 8th-grade reading level)
• Total Item Count: 49 trait-descriptive adjectives
• Triadic Structural Design: Respondents rate each of the 49 adjectives across three separate columns:
• Column I (Perceived Self): Evaluates how frequently the trait characterizes the individual (5-point scale: 1 = Seldom to 5 = Most of the time).
• Column II (Self-Acceptance): Evaluates the individual’s emotional attitude toward possessing that trait (5-point scale: 1 = Dislike very much to 5 = Like very much).
• Column III (Ideal Self): Evaluates how frequently the individual would like the trait to characterize them (5-point scale: 1 = Seldom to 5 = Most of the time).
• Scoring and Metrics:
  • Total Self-Concept Score (Col I): Sum of ratings in Column I (Range: 49 – 245).
  • Total Self-Acceptance Score (Col II): Sum of ratings in Column II (Range: 49 – 245). Higher scores denote superior self-acceptance and emotional self-regard.
  • Total Ideal Self Score (Col III): Sum of ratings in Column III (Range: 49 – 245). Reflects personal standards and aspirational levels.
  • Self-Ideal Discrepancy Score (D-Score): Calculated as $\sum |\text{Column I} – \text{Column III}|$ across all 49 items. Higher discrepancy scores indicate elevated internal incongruence, neurotic strain, and maladjustment.
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 25 minutes for complete triadic administration.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Index of Adjustment and Values was originally published in 1951 by Robert E. Bills, Edgar L. Vance, and Orison S. McLean in the Journal of Consulting Psychology, followed by the formal publication of the comprehensive clinical and educational assessment manual by the University of Alabama Department of Psychology in 1956. Because the instrument was developed and published prior to modern proprietary psychometric copyrights under university-sponsored research initiatives, the scale exists primarily in the public domain for academic, clinical, and non-commercial research purposes.

No licensing fees or commercial purchase clearances are required to administer, score, or adapt the instrument for non-commercial psychological research and clinical assessment. Researchers and practitioners utilizing the scale should provide appropriate scholarly attribution by citing the original 1951 validation paper and the 1956 manual.

References

• Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(1), i–171. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093360
• Bills, R. E., Vance, E. L., & McLean, O. S. (1951). An index of adjustment and values. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 15(3), 257–261. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054777
• Bills, R. E. (1956). Index of Adjustment and Values: Manual. University of Alabama: Department of Psychology.
• Lecky, P. (1945). Self-consistency: A theory of personality. Island Press.
• Lefkowitz, J. (1967). Self-esteem of industrial workers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 51(6), 521–528. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025178
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of social psychological attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
• Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications, and theory. Houghton Mifflin.
• Snygg, D., & Combs, A. W. (1949). Individual behavior: A new frame of reference for psychology. Harper & Brothers.
• Wylie, R. C. (1961). The self-concept: A critical survey of pertinent research literature. University of Nebraska Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)