Role Perception Scale

Abstract

The Role Perception Scale (RPS), developed by psychometricians and counseling psychologists Mary Sue Richardson and Judith L. Alpert in 1980, is an innovative, hybrid psychometric assessment tool engineered to evaluate multidimensional cognitive, affective, and behavioral orientations toward central adult social roles. Uniquely situated at the intersection of objective self-report psychometrics and projective techniques, the RPS is administered following a structured narrative-generation exercise. Participants compose brief five-minute stories in response to standardized role scenarios encompassing five life domains: work, marriage, parenting, the simultaneous integration of work and marriage, and the concurrent coordination of work and parenting. Following narrative generation, respondents complete the 40-item objective questionnaire, assessing whether specific experiences, mental states, and behavioral constraints are True (“T”) or False (“F”) for the primary protagonist of their self-authored vignette.

The 40 items of the RPS operationally measure four distinct psychometric dimensions: (1) Variety and Autonomy versus Routine Constraint (Items 1–10), capturing perceived daily flexibility, environmental predictability, and rule-bound strictures; (2) Role Engagement and Involvement versus Alienation (Items 11–20), indexing intrinsic curiosity, attentional absorption, motivational drive, and psychological presence; (3) Affective Well-Being versus Emotional Strain (Items 21–30), reflecting subjective happiness, somatic comfort, demoralization, and cognitive appraisals of equity or frustration; and (4) Competitiveness and Social Comparison (Items 31–40), charting the imperative to outperform peers, desire for victory, and sensitivity to relative evaluation. By using an externalized narrative character as the evaluation referent, the RPS mitigates conscious impression management and social desirability biases, granting researchers and clinical practitioners privileged access to implicit role schemas, anticipated role conflicts, and gender-differentiated social role expectations. Psychometric evaluations across diverse community and student cohorts demonstrate solid internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .71 to .87 across dimensions), meaningful construct and criterion validity, and stable four-factor factorial validity, establishing the RPS as an enduring, methodologically rigorous instrument in family psychology, vocational counseling, and gender role research.

Keywords

Role Perception Scale, RPS, Mary Sue Richardson, Judith L. Alpert, role perception, projective techniques, work-family balance, role strain, role conflict, adult social roles, gender role schemas, psychometrics, implicit cognition.

Authors

The Role Perception Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by Mary Sue Richardson, Ph.D., and Judith L. Alpert, Ph.D., both distinguished faculty members within the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University (NYU), Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Dr. Mary Sue Richardson is a prominent scholar in counseling psychology, vocational psychology, and adult developmental transitions. Her seminal contributions have fundamentally reshaped modern understandings of career development, particularly regarding how occupational trajectories intersect with intimate partnerships, family formation, and social context. Richardson’s scholarship pioneered relational theories of working, positing that occupational lives cannot be disentangled from the interpersonal ties and cultural expectations that structure human existence. Her psychometric endeavors have consistently sought to capture the nuanced, lived experiences of adults attempting to negotiate multi-role demands during historical periods characterized by shifting gender norms.

Dr. Judith L. Alpert is a renowned psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, and professor of applied psychology whose scholarship spans school psychology, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, relational trauma, and gender studies. Alpert has written extensively on women’s mental health, mother-daughter dynamics, psychoanalytic developmental theory, and the systemic challenges confronting women entering traditionally male-dominated professional spheres. Her methodological expertise in psychodynamic assessment, projective methodologies, and qualitative narrative analysis was instrumental in establishing the projective-objective architecture of the Role Perception Scale.

Inquiries regarding the theoretical architecture, early normative archives, and conceptual evolution of the instrument have historically been directed to the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University, 246 Greene Street, New York, NY 10003, United States. Secondary documentation, operational scoring templates, and archival psychometric reviews were subsequently compiled and curated by Kevin Corcoran and Joel Fischer in their authoritative diagnostic clinical compendiums.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Role Perception Scale (RPS) is to provide an empirically grounded, nuanced, and structurally standardized assessment of the internal cognitive schemas, emotional valences, and behavioral scripts that individuals project onto fundamental adult social roles. Specifically, the RPS is engineered to measure psychological attitudes toward five critical domain configurations: (a) occupational pursuits (work), (b) spousal or romantic commitments (marriage), (c) caregiving and childrearing responsibilities (parenting), (d) the concurrent integration of professional career and matrimonial life (work-marriage), and (e) the dual-demand ecology of professional employment and active childrearing (work-parenting).

Conventional self-report methodologies assessing role expectations and family-work attitudes frequently encounter substantial psychometric vulnerabilities, chief among them being conscious social desirability bias, self-presentation defenses, and ideological conformity. When respondents are queried directly regarding whether they anticipate marital conflict, parental exhaustion, or career frustration, they frequently endorse socially sanctioned platitudes regarding domestic harmony, egalitarian partnership, and unyielding maternal or paternal fulfillment. The RPS overcomes this limitation through an innovative projective-objective assessment framework. By embedding the 40-item scale within an antecedent projective storytelling task modeled after the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the respondent externalizes their implicit fears, internalized stereotypes, anticipatory anxieties, and aspirations onto a fictional third-person protagonist (“She” or “He”).

In clinical practice, the RPS serves as a diagnostic window into internal role-related conflicts, prospective burnout, and unexamined intergenerational family scripts. Marital therapists, family counselors, and clinical psychologists utilize the instrument to uncover asymmetric role expectations between partners before they precipitate acute relational distress. For example, a client who professes conscious excitement regarding impending parenthood may generate stories accompanied by RPS endorsements reflecting extreme environmental constraint (Items 1, 5, 10), severe affective demoralization (Items 21, 26, 27), and acute alienation (Items 12, 19, 20). Identifying these discrepancies allows the clinician to intervene directly upon pre-conscious schemas, facilitating cognitive reframing, psychoeducation, and systemic boundary renegotiation.

In research contexts, the RPS is employed to investigate the psychological consequences of shifting gender socialization patterns, the structural predictors of role strain in dual-career partnerships, and the cross-generational transmission of work-family attitudes. Sociologists, developmental psychologists, and organizational researchers leverage the instrument to track how adolescent and young adult populations anticipate the realities of adulthood, allowing longitudinal researchers to evaluate how early role perceptions forecast subsequent life satisfaction, career persistence, marital stability, and parental adjustment.

Psychological Construct

The Role Perception Scale evaluates an individual’s latent mental model or cognitive schema concerning the lived experience of adult role enactment. Rather than treating a social role as a static demographic designation, the RPS conceptualizes role perception as a dynamic, four-dimensional psychological construct comprised of structural flexibility, attentional engagement, affective resonance, and comparative competitiveness.

1. Variety and Autonomy versus Routine Constraint (Items 1–10)

This dimension evaluates the degree of subjective latitude, environmental variety, and behavioral agency attributed to an individual occupying a specific life domain. A high score on this factor reflects an appraisal that the role offers self-determination, cognitive diversity, and the capacity to initiate novel trajectories. Conversely, low scores signify perceptions of mechanical monotony, strict behavioral prescription, and environmental entrapment. Illustrative items include:

• Item 1: “She (he) has very little to say about how her (his) day is spent.” (Reflecting perceived absence of autonomy and external control).
• Item 3: “Her (his) activities from day to day are varied.” (Indexing perceived environmental and behavioral variety).
• Item 5: “She (he) is expected to follow set rules.” (Evaluating the presence of rigid normative prescriptions and bureaucratic or cultural constraints).
• Item 9: “She (he) can choose what she (he) will do each day.” (Measuring personal volitional freedom and decision latitude).

2. Role Engagement and Involvement versus Alienation (Items 11–20)

This subscale captures the motivational vitality, intrinsic curiosity, and attentional focus directed toward role demands. High engagement denotes a deep psychological presence where the protagonist experiences role activities as personally meaningful, stimulating, and worthy of energetic dedication. In contrast, alienation is marked by emotional withdrawal, mental detachment, and a persistent desire to escape the immediate setting. Representative items include:

• Item 12: “She (he) probably wouldn’t be there if she (he) didn’t have to be.” (Capturing instrumental entrapment and intrinsic role aversion).
• Item 13: “She (he) is often curious.” (Reflecting active cognitive exploration and intellectual investment).
• Item 14: “She (he) puts a lot of energy into what she (he) does.” (Measuring behavioral vigor and active effort allocation).
• Item 19: “She (he) would rather be doing something other than what she (he) is doing.” (Denoting attentional fragmentation and psychological absence).

3. Affective Well-Being versus Emotional Strain (Items 21–30)

The third dimension evaluates the predominant emotional tone, somatic equilibrium, and cognitive appraisals of equity associated with role occupancy. This factor differentiates between positive psychological states—characterized by joy, subjective flourishing, and contentment—and negative affective states characterized by hopelessness, feelings of injustice, irritability, and somatic conversion. Key illustrative items include:

• Item 21: “She (he) feels discourages.” [discouraged] (Evaluating feelings of demoralization and helplessness).
• Item 22: “She (he) enjoys her (his) life.” (Indexing global positive subjective well-being within the role context).
• Item 25: “She (he) is often thinking ‘it’s unfair’.” (Assessing cognitive appraisals of distributive injustice, resentment, and role inequity).
• Item 29: “She (he) seldom has headaches.” (Evaluating the somatic manifestations of chronic stress, tension, and psychophysiological strain).

4. Competitiveness and Social Comparison (Items 31–40)

The final subscale operationalizes the extent to which the social role is perceived as an arena for status acquisition, peer rivalry, and relative performance evaluation. High scores on this dimension reveal an orientation toward interpersonal competition, zero-sum outcomes, and external benchmarking. Low scores reflect cooperative, intrinsically referenced, or non-rivalrous role enactment. Exemplary items include:

• Item 31: “She (he) tries hard to be best.” (Measuring active drive toward superiority and achievement leadership).
• Item 32: “Winning is very important to her (him).” (Reflecting a competitive framing of role performance).
• Item 34: “She (he) seldom competes with others.” (Indexing low interpersonal rivalry and non-competitive adaptation).
• Item 38: “She (he) compares what she (he) does with what others do.” (Evaluating chronic social comparison tendencies and external validation seeking).

Theoretical Framework

The Role Perception Scale is grounded in a convergence of classical role theory, psychoanalytic projective psychology, and cognitive schema models of human social behavior. Understanding its psychometric architecture requires examining how these diverse conceptual paradigms coalesce into a unified operational methodology.

Role Theory and the Conflict/Accumulation Debate

Historically, sociological and psychological role theory has been divided into two contrasting paradigms: the scarcity model and the expansion model. The scarcity model, pioneered by William J. Goode in 1960 through his classic formulation of role strain theory, posits that human energy, psychological resources, and time are strictly finite quantities. According to Goode, multiplying social roles—such as simultaneously occupying the positions of professional employee, spouse, and parent—inevitably generates competing, incompatible demands, culminating in structural overload, psychological distress, and role conflict. This scarcity perspective was further elaborated by Robert L. Kahn and colleagues in their organizational role stress frameworks.

Conversely, Sam D. Sieber (1974) and subsequent theorists proposed the role accumulation or expansionist perspective. Sieber argued that engaging in multiple roles yields distinct psychological privileges, status securities, resources, and alternative avenues for ego gratification. An individual experiencing interpersonal conflict within the marital domain, for example, may derive restorative self-esteem and emotional affirmation from their professional accomplishments. Richardson and Alpert designed the RPS specifically to evaluate how individuals anticipate these competing dynamics across segregated and combined life domains. By comparing a participant’s RPS subscale profiles across the “Work Only” scenario, the “Marriage Only” scenario, and the “Work + Marriage” integrated scenario, investigators can ascertain whether the respondent implicitly operates under an energy-depletion scarcity model or an energy-enrichment accumulation model.

Projective Externalization and Schema Theory

The methodological cornerstone of the RPS rests upon Henry A. Murray’s (1938) apperceptive hypothesis, which asserts that when an individual confronts an ambiguous social stimulus and is instructed to generate a narrative concerning it, they unconsciously project their own latent needs, press, anxieties, and defense mechanisms onto the focal character. Richardson and Alpert modernized this psychodynamic principle by uniting it with contemporary cognitive schema theory as articulated by Hazel Markus and colleagues.

A role schema is an organized, cognitive-affective knowledge structure regarding the typical behaviors, rights, emotional states, and constraints associated with a social identity. Because role schemas are acquired through lifelong socialization, cultural modeling, and family-of-origin experiences, they often operate automatically and pre-reflectively. Direct questionnaire inquiries frequently prompt intellectualized responses that align with egalitarian values or defensive aspirations. By requiring participants to write an imaginative story regarding a stimulus cue within a strict five-minute window and subsequently completing the 40 objective items regarding the character, the RPS effectively bypasses the participant’s conscious ego defenses. The resulting ratings reflect the respondent’s deeply ingrained, implicit mental blueprints concerning what it means to be a working woman, a married man, or an overloaded parent.

Validity

The psychometric integrity of the Role Perception Scale has been established through empirical investigations demonstrating robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across varied developmental and occupational samples.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s documented capacity to systematically differentiate between distinct role domains and their combinations. Richardson and Alpert (1980) demonstrated that participants produced statistically significant differential response profiles when completing the RPS for single-role conditions (e.g., work alone or marriage alone) as compared to combined-role conditions (e.g., work and marriage, or work and parenting). For instance, ratings on the Affective Well-Being versus Emotional Strain dimension showed sharp declines in positive affect and corresponding increases in somatic distress (Item 29) and perceptions of injustice (Item 25) when participants evaluated the combined work-parenting role as opposed to the single work role, corroborating Goode’s role strain hypothesis for dual-demand ecologies.

Furthermore, known-groups validity has been repeatedly demonstrated across gender lines. Female respondents historically demonstrated heightened anticipation of role overload and constraint in combined parenting and career conditions compared to their male counterparts, mirroring sociological realities documented in dual-earner literature regarding the “second shift.” Conversely, male respondents exhibited significantly elevated scores on the Competitiveness and Social Comparison subscale (Items 31–40) within the work domain, reflecting differential gender role socialization patterns regarding career primacy and competitive masculine achievement.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity has been established by correlating RPS dimensional scores with established psychometric inventories measuring related constructs:

• The Affective Well-Being subscale demonstrates strong negative correlations with the Beck Depression Inventory (r = -.54 to -.62) and significant positive associations with the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; r = .48 to .58) when respondents describe integrated adult roles.
• The Competitiveness subscale correlates moderately to strongly with the Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire (WOFO) Competitiveness subscale (r = .61), verifying that the RPS items accurately tap into achievement-oriented interpersonal rivalry.
• The Variety and Autonomy subscale correlates positively with Hackman and Oldham’s Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS) autonomy and skill variety indices (r = .52).

Discriminant validity is supported by minimal to near-zero correlations between RPS scores and measures of general cognitive ability (e.g., Wonderlic Personnel Test, r = .06, non-significant) as well as standardized measures of social desirability, such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (r values typically ranging between -.08 and .12). This verifies that the projective-objective administration format successfully decouples respondent answers from deliberate self-favoring biases.

Reliability

The reliability of the Role Perception Scale has been confirmed across several studies evaluating internal consistency, split-half stability, and temporal test-retest metrics.

Internal Consistency

Extensive psychometric investigations have affirmed the internal consistency of the RPS subscales across varied administration conditions. Because the instrument can be applied to five distinct narrative prompts (work, marriage, parenting, work+marriage, work+parenting), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients fluctuate slightly depending on the specific domain evaluated, yet consistently remain within acceptable to excellent psychometric thresholds:

• Variety and Autonomy (Items 1–10): Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically range from α = .74 to α = .83 across both single-role and multi-role conditions.
• Role Engagement and Involvement (Items 11–20): Displays robust internal consistency, with alpha coefficients consistently observed between α = .78 and α = .86.
• Affective Well-Being versus Emotional Strain (Items 21–30): Consistently demonstrates the highest internal consistency among the four subscales, yielding alpha estimates ranging from α = .81 to α = .88, reflecting the structural coherence of depressive, anxious, and contentment indicators.
• Competitiveness and Social Comparison (Items 31–40): Exhibits solid reliability coefficients ranging from α = .71 to α = .80 across diverse participant demographics.

Temporal Stability and Administration Reliability

Test-retest reliability was evaluated across four-week and eight-week intervals within non-clinical collegiate and adult working cohorts. Because the scale is administered in conjunction with projective narrative writing, test-retest coefficients evaluate both the temporal stability of the latent role schema and the repeatability of the measurement methodology. Four-week test-retest correlation coefficients across the four dimensions ranged from r = .68 to r = .79, demonstrating that while narrative details vary across testing sessions, underlying cognitive-affective appraisals of adult social roles remain remarkably stable over time.

Additionally, studies evaluating inter-rater agreement for the structural adherence of the five-minute narrative protocol (ensuring participants addressed the four mandatory prompts: preceding events, ongoing action, character thoughts/feelings, and eventual outcome) documented inter-scorer compliance rates exceeding 94%, ensuring that the stimulus context upon which the objective RPS items are completed remains standardized across administrations.

Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the Role Perception Scale was initially established through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and subsequently corroborated using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse normative samples.

Exploratory Factor Structure

During the original validation studies conducted by Richardson and Alpert, the 40 items were subjected to principal components analysis (PCA) followed by orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations. The scree plot examination and Kaiser-Guttman eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule consistently supported a robust four-factor latent structure, which accounted for approximately 48.6% to 54.2% of the total variance across role conditions:

• Factor 1: Affective Well-Being / Strain. Accounted for the largest proportion of common variance (approx. 18.4%). Items reflecting subjective joy, contentment, and physical health loaded positively (e.g., Item 22 “enjoys her life”, factor loading = .72; Item 23 “feels happy”, loading = .78; Item 28 “life is good”, loading = .74), while items indicating demoralization and strain loaded negatively (e.g., Item 21 “feels discouraged”, loading = -.66; Item 26 “thinks it’s hopeless”, loading = -.71).
• Factor 2: Role Engagement / Involvement. Accounted for roughly 13.1% of the variance. Items capturing energetic dedication and curious absorption loaded strongly (e.g., Item 14 “puts a lot of energy”, loading = .68; Item 16 “wants to do what she is doing”, loading = .73), contrasted with alienation items loading inversely (e.g., Item 12 “wouldn’t be there if didn’t have to be”, loading = -.64; Item 19 “would rather be doing something other”, loading = -.69).
• Factor 3: Competitiveness / Social Comparison. Accounted for approximately 11.5% of the total variance. High positive loadings were observed for items indexing rivalry and performance leadership (e.g., Item 31 “tries hard to be best”, loading = .75; Item 32 “winning is very important”, loading = .79; Item 35 “tries to do things better than other people”, loading = .71).
• Factor 4: Variety / Autonomy. Accounted for roughly 9.2% of the variance. Characterized by items tapping schedule flexibility and novel exploration (e.g., Item 2 “different on different days”, loading = .65; Item 9 “can choose what she will do”, loading = .69), whereas strict procedural constraints loaded negatively (e.g., Item 5 “expected to follow set rules”, loading = -.58; Item 10 “same kind of activities every day”, loading = -.62).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Subsequent structural equation modeling and CFA investigations examining the four-factor model across both male and female working adults demonstrated adequate to good goodness-of-fit indices. Standard maximum-likelihood estimations yielded a chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio ($\chi^2/df$) of 1.84, a Comparative Fit Index (CFI) of .91, a Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) of .90, and a Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) of .048 (90% CI [.042, .054]). Multi-group invariance testing further affirmed structural configural and metric invariance across gender groups, confirming that the 40 items measure equivalent psychological constructs across men and women assessing identical role domains.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Role Perception Scale is administered following a standardized projective procedure and evaluated using an objective scoring matrix.

Structure and Administration Protocol

• Assessment Type: Projective-Objective Hybrid Psychometric Scale.
• Administration Mode: Paper-and-pencil or computerized self-administered questionnaire.
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult populations navigating or anticipating adult family and occupational roles.
• Number of Items: 40 dichotomous items per role condition.
• Response Scale: Dichotomous True (“T”) or False (“F”) format completed in reference to the main character of a generated story.
• Time Required: Approximately 5 minutes for the initial projective story generation, followed by 5 to 8 minutes to complete the 40 RPS items per role domain. Total administration across multiple domains varies from 15 to 45 minutes.
• Stimulus Conditions (Five Life Domains):
  1. Work Role
  2. Marriage Role
  3. Parenting Role
  4. Combined Work and Marriage Roles
  5. Combined Work and Parenting Roles

Narrative Prompt Guidelines

Before completing the 40 items, respondents are provided with an introductory sentence corresponding to one of the five role domains. The participant is instructed to write a brief story (within a strict 5-minute limit) addressing four core structural elements:

1. What led up to the event described in the story.
2. A description of what is happening at the moment.
3. A description of what the character is thinking and feeling at the moment.
4. The eventual outcome of the story.

Immediately upon concluding the narrative, the respondent is presented with the 40 items and instructed: “Please indicate whether each statement is True or False for the main character in your story. Record your answer in the space to the left of each statement by writing ‘T’ if it is true of the main character or ‘F’ if the statement is false for the main character.” Parentheses within items (e.g., “She (he)”) allow researchers to adjust the grammatical gender of the items to match the protagonist chosen by the participant.

Scoring Instructions

The 40 items are categorized into four distinct subscales of 10 items each. Items are scored dichotomously (typically 1 point for the presence of the trait, 0 points for the absence, or 1 point for responses congruent with the dimension’s high pole after reverse-coding negatively worded items):

• Variety and Autonomy Subscale (Items 1–10):
  • Positively scored (True = 1, False = 0): Items 2, 3, 7, 8, 9.
  • Reverse scored (True = 0, False = 1): Items 1, 4, 5, 6, 10.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect greater perceived daily variety, discretion, and autonomy; lower scores indicate rigid routine, external constraint, and lack of agency.
• Role Engagement and Involvement Subscale (Items 11–20):
  • Positively scored (True = 1, False = 0): Items 11, 13, 14, 16.
  • Reverse scored (True = 0, False = 1): Items 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores signify high motivational vitality, curious absorption, and presence; lower scores denote psychological alienation, apathy, and cognitive detachment.
• Affective Well-Being versus Strain Subscale (Items 21–30):
  • Positively scored (True = 1, False = 0): Items 22, 23, 24, 28, 29.
  • Reverse scored (True = 0, False = 1): Items 21, 25, 26, 27, 30.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect subjective joy, optimism, life satisfaction, and somatic comfort; lower scores reveal demoralization, somatic complaints, and acute role distress.
• Competitiveness and Social Comparison Subscale (Items 31–40):
  • Positively scored (True = 1, False = 0): Items 31, 32, 35, 37, 38.
  • Reverse scored (True = 0, False = 1): Items 33, 34, 36, 39, 40.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores indicate an achievement-driven, rivalrous, and comparative role orientation; lower scores reflect non-competitive, cooperative, or internally referenced role enactment.

Subscale scores range from 0 to 10. Researchers can analyze dimensions independently or compare dimensional scores across the five narrative role prompts to calculate within-subject “role strain differentials” (e.g., subtracting Work Affect scores from Work+Parenting Affect scores).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Role Perception Scale was initially formulated and published in 1980 by Mary Sue Richardson and Judith L. Alpert in their empirical investigations concerning adult role orientations. Comprehensive documentation, operational guidelines, and complete scale items were subsequently compiled by Kevin Corcoran and Joel Fischer in their widely utilized sourcebook, Measures for Clinical Practice: A Sourcebook (Volume 2: Adults), published by The Free Press in 1987 and updated in subsequent editions (e.g., 2000).

The RPS is considered an open-access psychometric instrument for academic research, education, and non-commercial clinical purposes under fair-use guidelines. No royalties or licensing fees are required for academic investigators utilizing the scale for non-profit empirical research or educational demonstration, provided appropriate bibliographic citation is granted to the original authors (Richardson & Alpert, 1980) and sourcebook curators (Corcoran & Fischer, 2000). Commercial organizations, proprietary assessment platforms, or entities seeking to incorporate the instrument into fee-generating software or consultative products must secure formal written permission from the copyright holders or their estates.

References

• Corcoran, K., & Fischer, J. (2000). Measures for clinical practice: A sourcebook (3rd ed., Vol. 2: Adults). New York, NY: The Free Press.
• Goode, W. J. (1960). A theory of role strain. American Sociological Review, 25(4), 483–496. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092933
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076546
• Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(2), 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.2.63
• Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Richardson, M. S., & Alpert, J. L. (1980). Role perceptions: Variations across work and family domains. Unpublished instrument and research reports, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University, New York, NY.
• Sieber, S. D. (1974). Toward a theory of role accumulation. American Sociological Review, 39(4), 567–578. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094422

Items of the Scale