Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ)

Abstract

The Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ) is a widely utilized psychometric instrument developed within the conceptual framework of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Relational Frame Theory (RFT). Designed by Kelly G. Wilson and colleagues (Wilson & Murrell, 2004; Wilson et al., 2010), the VLQ assesses an individual’s self-reported valuation and behavioral enactment across ten distinct domains of human functioning: family relationships, marriage/intimate partnerships, parenting, friendships/social life, employment/career, education/training, recreation/leisure, spirituality, citizenship/community engagement, and physical self-care. The assessment employs a two-part operational format. In Part 1, respondents rate the personal importance of each domain on a 10-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“not at all important”) to 10 (“extremely important”). In Part 2, respondents evaluate their behavioral consistency with these identified values over the preceding week using a parallel 10-point scale from 1 (“not at all consistent with my value”) to 10 (“completely consistent with my value”). Psychometric evaluations have revealed sound internal consistency, satisfactory test-retest reliability across short-term test intervals, and robust convergent and construct validity with measures of psychological distress, experiential avoidance, depression, anxiety, and positive psychological functioning. Beyond yielding discrete domain-specific and aggregate composite scores, the VLQ allows clinicians and researchers to calculate an integrated composite score that reflects values-congruent behavioral commitment weighted by subjective valuation. The instrument plays a foundational role in functional behavioral assessment, psychological flexibility profiling, clinical outcome monitoring, and translational research in contextual behavioral science.

Keywords

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Valued Living Questionnaire, values assessment, psychological flexibility, behavioral consistency, Relational Frame Theory, functional contextualism, experiential avoidance, valued action, psychometrics

Authors

The Valued Living Questionnaire was conceptualized and formalized by researchers within the contextual behavioral science community:

• Kelly G. Wilson, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Mississippi, co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and director of the Center for Contextual Psychology.
• Amy R. Murrell, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas, specialist in child, adolescent, and family applications of contextual behavioral interventions.
• Emily K. Sandoz, Ph.D. — Endowed Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, editor of the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, and researcher in clinical behavior analysis.
• Jennifer Kitchens, M.A. — Clinical researcher and behavioral psychotherapist affiliated with the University of Mississippi during initial scale validation studies.
• Mark E. Roberts, Ph.D. — Quantitative research psychologist and psychometrician collaborating on the behavioral operationalization of valued living.

Purpose

The primary clinical and empirical objective of the Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ) is to operationalize, quantify, and track the construct of valued action within human lives. In traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, treatment often prioritizes the direct alleviation of symptom topography—such as reducing negative automatic thoughts, lowering subjective units of distress, or dampening physiological arousal. Conversely, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and broader contextual behavioral therapies conceptualize psychological suffering not merely as the presence of unwanted inner experiences, but as the constriction of vital, meaningful living caused by experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion.

The VLQ addresses a critical measurement need: providing an assessment paradigm that differentiates between an individual’s verbally declared personal ideals and their observable behavioral commitment. Clinically, clients frequently present with significant discrepancies between what they identify as deeply meaningful and how they allocate their time, attention, and effort. For example, a client may rate “physical self-care” or “parenting” as maximally important (a rating of 10), yet report near-zero behavioral consistency over the preceding week due to avoidance, depression, behavioral inhibition, or occupational burnout.

By assessing both personal importance and behavioral consistency across ten life domains, the VLQ provides clinicians and researchers with several distinct capabilities:

• Baseline Motivational Profiling: Identifying which domains hold appetitive value for the individual, establishing idiosyncratic targets for behavioral activation.
• Assessment of Values-Action Discrepancy: Pinpointing life areas characterized by high importance yet low behavioral consistency, which typically represent major focal points of psychological pain and clinical vulnerability.
• Process Monitoring: Tracking dynamic shifts in behavioral engagement over the course of psychotherapy or behavioral health interventions, independent of whether acute distress symptoms have fully remitted.
• Research on Psychological Flexibility: Serving as a primary dependent variable or mediator in contextual behavioral science studies examining how acceptance, defusion, and mindfulness foster committed action.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the VLQ is valued living, operationalized within functional contextualism and Relational Frame Theory. Unlike static personality traits, theoretical constructs of basic needs, or discrete milestones (goals), values in this context are defined as freely chosen, verbally constructed, appetitive global qualities of ongoing purposive action.

Values Versus Goals

In the psychometric architecture of the VLQ, values are strictly distinguished from goals:

• Goals are finite, attainable, and terminable outcomes. Once a goal is reached (e.g., obtaining a university degree, getting married, buying a home), it ceases to function as an immediate guide for behavior.
• Values represent continuous, lifelong directions rather than destinations. They function analogously to cardinal directions on a compass (e.g., “heading West”). One never arrives at “West”; rather, heading West continuously organizes, guides, and contextualizes specific behavioral choices over time.

The Dual-Component Measurement Paradigm

The VLQ operationalizes valued living through two interconnected sub-constructs across ten distinct functional life domains:

• Subjective Importance (Valuation): The degree to which an individual constructs a given life domain as central, personally meaningful, and desirable. This is not evaluated against normative societal expectations, moral mandates, or familial obligations; rather, it reflects personal, internally generated significance.
• Behavioral Consistency (Valued Action): The extent to which an individual has engaged in actions consistent with their declared values within a circumscribed time window (specifically, the previous week). Valued action involves overt, measurable behaviors that serve an appetitive reinforcing function in alignment with chosen values.

The Ten Life Domains

The VLQ samples human functioning across ten discrete behavioral domains designed to capture a comprehensive life landscape:

1. Family (other than marriage or parenting): Sustaining meaningful, cooperative, and supportive connections with parents, siblings, extended family, and kin.
2. Marriage/couples/intimate relations: Cultivating intimacy, emotional vulnerability, sexual connection, and relational fidelity in romantic partnerships.
3. Parenting: Engaging in nurturing, teaching, protective, and compassionate interactions with one’s children.
4. Friends/social life: Developing peer relationships, shared experiences, mutual support, and social recreational activities.
5. Work: Dedicating effort toward occupational, career, or vocational responsibilities and professional growth.
6. Education/training: Pursuing formal learning, self-study, skills acquisition, and intellectual development.
7. Recreation/fun: Participating in play, hobbies, athletic pursuits, creative exploration, and unstructured restorative leisure.
8. Spirituality: Experiencing connection with transcendent realities, nature, organized religious traditions, or personal existential meaning.
9. Citizenship/Community Life: Participating in civic affairs, neighborhood development, political action, environmental stewardship, or volunteer service.
10. Physical self-care (diet, exercise, sleep): Maintaining somatic health, physiological wellness, nutrition, restorative rest, and proactive health maintenance.

Theoretical Framework

The Valued Living Questionnaire is grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and its foundational language paradigm, Relational Frame Theory (RFT). Both rest upon the philosophical system of functional contextualism, which analyzes psychological events as ongoing interactions between whole organisms and historically and situational contexts.

The Hexaflex Model of Psychological Flexibility

In the ACT Hexaflex model, psychological health is defined by psychological flexibility: the ability to contact the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, to change or persist in behavior in the service of chosen values. The Hexaflex comprises six interrelated core processes organized into two overarching functional dyads:

• Acceptance and Mindfulness Processes: Acceptance (willingness to experience unwanted thoughts, emotions, and sensations without defensive avoidance), Cognitive Defusion (interacting with thoughts as ongoing verbal processes rather than literal truths), Contact with the Present Moment (flexible, non-judgmental attention to the here-and-now), and Self-as-Context (an invariant observational sense of self distinct from transient psychological content).
• Commitment and Behavior Change Processes: Values (defining what gives life personal meaning and direction) and Committed Action (building progressively larger patterns of effective, values-congruent overt behavior).

The VLQ directly operationalizes the second dyad: clarifying values and measuring the extent of committed action. Without values clarification, acceptance and mindfulness risk becoming passive endurance or hedonistic detachment. In ACT, mindfulness and defusion are not ends in themselves; they serve as psychological tools designed to liberate behavioral capacity so that an individual can engage in valued living.

Relational Frame Theory: Augmenting and Rule-Governed Behavior

From an RFT perspective, human values represent verbally constructed motivating operations termed augmentals. Relational Frame Theory distinguishes three major types of rule-governed behavior:

• Pliance: Rule-governed behavior maintained by socially mediated consequences for compliance with the rule (e.g., pursuing a career solely to satisfy parental expectations or avoid social shame).
• Tracking: Rule-governed behavior maintained by the actual physical or functional correspondence between the rule and natural environmental contingencies (e.g., exercising because it directly improves stamina and mood).
• Augmenting: Relational behavior that alters the reinforcing potency of previously established environmental consequences. Values function as formative augmentals that establish previously neutral or challenging behavioral chains (e.g., studying long hours, having difficult relational conversations) as personally reinforcing because they coordinate with abstract relational networks of meaning.

The VLQ functions to orient individuals away from pliance-based tracking (“What should I value based on social demands?”) toward intrinsic augmentative tracking (“What qualities of living do I freely choose to stand for?”).

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Valued Living Questionnaire has been evaluated across non-clinical, collegiate, community, and clinical cohorts (Wilson et al., 2010; McCracken & Yang, 2006; VanBuskirk, 2014).

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by significant, predictable correlations with established clinical and well-being markers:

• Psychological Distress and Psychopathology: Behavioral consistency on the VLQ exhibits moderate to strong negative correlations with the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; $r = -.42$ to $-.58$) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; $r = -.36$ to $-.48$). Individuals who enact their values consistently experience lower psychological distress, whereas elevated importance coupled with low consistency is associated with elevated depressive symptomatology.
• Experiential Avoidance: VLQ Consistency scores correlate negatively with the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ and AAQ-2; $r = -.38$ to $-.52$), demonstrating that experiential avoidance restricts the behavioral range necessary for valued action.
• Subjective Well-Being and Vitality: VLQ Consistency and composite scores correlate positively with the Positive Affect subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; $r = .40$ to $.55$) and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; $r = .45$ to $.61$).

Discriminant Validity

The VLQ differentiates between abstract verbal valuation and tangible behavioral enactment:

• Correlations between the Part 1 (Importance) and Part 2 (Consistency) subscales are generally modest ($r = .20$ to $.40$). This psychometric divergence confirms that valuing a life domain does not automatically yield behavioral engagement, validating the theoretical necessity of assessing both dimensions separately.
• The VLQ demonstrates low correlations with measures of social desirability (e.g., Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale; $r < .18$), confirming that respondents' self-reports of importance and consistency are not primarily artifacts of impression management.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

In clinical outcome trials, changes in VLQ Consistency scores longitudinally predict therapeutic gains:

• In chronic pain rehabilitation (McCracken & Yang, 2006), increases in valued action predicted reductions in pain-related disability and depression, even after controlling for objective pain intensity.
• In behavioral activation and ACT treatments for major depressive disorder, early-treatment increases in the VLQ Composite score reliably predict post-treatment remission and lower rates of relapse at 6-month and 12-month follow-up evaluations.

Reliability

The reliability of the VLQ has been documented across multiple validation studies, examining both internal consistency and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency

Evaluating internal consistency for the VLQ requires distinct consideration of its subscales:

• VLQ Importance (Part 1): Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the 10 importance items typically range from $\alpha = .75$ to $\alpha = .83$. Given that the 10 domains are heterogeneous by design (e.g., high valuation of spirituality does not necessitate high valuation of career or marriage), these moderate-to-high coefficients indicate satisfactory internal coherence while preserving domain diversity.
• VLQ Consistency (Part 2): Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the 10 consistency items consistently fall between $\alpha = .80$ and $\alpha = .88$, reflecting strong internal consistency in behavioral enactment across distinct life spheres.
• VLQ Composite: When calculated as an aggregate importance-weighted index, the composite score demonstrates internal reliability estimates routinely exceeding $\alpha = .82$.

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability metrics vary predictably as a function of the underlying theoretical construct:

• Importance Subscale: In test-retest investigations over a 1- to 2-week interval (Wilson et al., 2010), the Importance subscale demonstrated high stability, with Pearson correlation coefficients ranging from $r = .80$ to $r = .88$. This confirms that personal valuation remains relatively stable over brief time horizons.
• Consistency Subscale: Across the same 1- to 2-week retest window, the Consistency subscale yielded test-retest coefficients ranging from $r = .65$ to $r = .78$. Because Part 2 specifically assesses overt behavior “during the past week,” lower stability relative to Importance is conceptually expected, reflecting real-world fluctuations in weekly schedules, stressors, and behavioral opportunities.

Factor Analysis

The structural characteristics of the Valued Living Questionnaire have been analyzed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), shedding light on the multidimensional nature of values.

Exploratory Factor Analyses

Early factor-analytic investigations by Wilson and colleagues (2010) examined whether the 10 domains loaded onto a unified latent factor or reflected differentiated spheres of human interest:

• When analyzed independently, the 10 items of the Consistency scale frequently yield a robust single-factor solution accounting for approximately 42% to 48% of the total variance, with factor loadings ranging from .48 (Spirituality) to .76 (Friends/social life). This suggests that individuals tend to possess a generalized behavioral capacity for values consistency across domains.
• In contrast, factor analyses of the Importance scale frequently yield multi-factor solutions (often two or three factors), reflecting distinct thematic clusters: (a) Interpersonal/Relational (Family, Marriage, Parenting, Friends), (b) Personal Growth/Achievement (Work, Education, Recreation), and (c) Transpersonal/Physical Self (Spirituality, Citizenship, Self-Care).

Confirmatory Factor Modeling

Subsequent psychometric examinations using structural equation modeling have tested competing structural representations of the VLQ:

• Two-Factor Correlated Model: Modeling Part 1 (Importance) and Part 2 (Consistency) as two distinct yet correlated latent constructs yields acceptable fit across standard indices: $chi^2/df < 2.5$, Comparative Fit Index (CFI)$ge .91$, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI)$ge .90$, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA)$le .062$ (90% CI [.048, .075]).
• Formative Versus Reflective Indicators: Methodologists have noted that the 10 domains can be conceptualized as formative indicators of valued living rather than purely reflective indicators. Because an individual can live a values-rich life by concentrating intensely on a select subset of domains (e.g., family and work) while deliberately de-emphasizing others (e.g., spirituality), traditional reflective factor models may underestimate the instrument’s structural coherence.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ)
• Alternative Titles: VLQ-1; Valued Living Questionnaire – Part 1 and Part 2
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents (ages 14 and older) in clinical, organizational, and general community populations
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; available in paper-and-pencil, computerized, and online administration formats
• Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Structural Composition: 10 distinct life domains, each presented twice across two sequential sections:
• Section 1 (Importance): 10 items assessing personal valuation
• Section 2 (Consistency): 10 items assessing behavioral enactment during the past week
• Response Format: 10-point Likert-type scales:
• Importance: 1 (“not at all important”) to 10 (“extremely important”)
• Consistency: 1 (“not at all consistent with my value”) to 10 (“completely consistent with my value”)
• Scoring Paradigms:
• Mean Importance Score: Calculated by summing all 10 Importance ratings and dividing by 10 (range: 1.0 to 10.0).
• Mean Consistency Score: Calculated by summing all 10 Consistency ratings and dividing by 10 (range: 1.0 to 10.0).
• Composite Valued Living Score (CVLS): Measures overall values-directed living weighted by subjective valuation. Calculated by multiplying the Importance score by the Consistency score for each domain, summing the products, and dividing by 10 (or dividing by the number of endorsed domains):
  $$\text{CVLS} = \frac{1}{10} \sum_{i=1}^{10} (\text{Importance}_i \times \text{Consistency}_i)$$
  (Theoretical range: 1.0 to 100.0).
• Domain Discrepancy Index: Derived by calculating the absolute or directional difference between Importance and Consistency for each domain ($|\text{Importance}_i – \text{Consistency}_i|$), pinpointing specific areas of functional impairment.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Valued Living Questionnaire was developed in 2004 (Wilson & Murrell) and formally standardized in 2010 (Wilson, Sandoz, Kitchens, & Roberts). In alignment with the open-science principles of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS), the VLQ is an open-access psychometric instrument available in the public domain for research and clinical practice.

No licensing fees, commercial royalties, or formal administrative permissions are required to use, reproduce, or translate the scale for non-commercial clinical or scientific applications. The scale can be downloaded directly from academic repositories and clinical organizations such as Division 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA). Researchers using the instrument are expected to cite the primary validation publication (Wilson et al., 2010).

References

Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

McCracken, L. M., & Yang, S. Y. (2006). The role of values in a contextual cognitive-behavioral approach to chronic pain. Pain, 123(1–2), 137–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2006.02.021

Plumb, J. C., Stewart, I., Dahl, J., & Lundgren, T. (2009). In search of meaning: Values in modern clinical behavior analysis. The Behavior Analyst, 32(1), 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392177

VanBuskirk, J. (2014). Assessment of valued living: A review of the literature and psychometric evaluation of the Valued Living Questionnaire (Master’s thesis). University of Mississippi. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/965/

Wilson, K. G., & Murrell, A. R. (2004). Values work in acceptance and commitment therapy: Setting a course for behavioral treatment. In S. C. Hayes, V. M. Follette, & M. M. Linehan (Eds.), Mindfulness and acceptance: Expanding the cognitive behavioral tradition (pp. 120–151). Guilford Press.

Wilson, K. G., Sandoz, E. K., Kitchens, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2010). The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and measuring valued action within a behavioral framework. The Psychological Record, 60(2), 249–272. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03395706

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)