Self-control as a personality measure

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Abstract

The study examined the interrelationships of a self-report measure of self-control, based in the General Theory of Crime advanced by Gottfredson and Hirschi [Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.], the Conscientiousness scale from the Five Factor model of personality, the BIS/BAS scales of Carver and White [Carver, D. S., & White, T. L. (1994). Behavioural inhibition, behavioural activation and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: the BIS/BAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(2), 319–333.], and self-report measures of imprudent behaviour and criminal intent. The Self-Control scale showed some overlap with the Conscientiousness and BAS scales, but no significant relationship with the BIS measure. Conscientiousness predicted both imprudent behaviour and criminal intent and the Self-Control scale and BIS predicted criminal intent. The results indicate similarity between the self-control measure and existing personality scales as well as some unique variance in self-control of predictive value.

Section snippets

Method

A total of 36 male and 84 female undergraduates (mean age 26.7 years, S.D.=9.5 years) participated as part of a course requirement. The School's ethics committee approved the project prior to its commencement.

Participants completed individually and anonymously the Self-Control scale of Gibbs et al. (1998), the Conscientiousness scale of the NEO (Costa & McCrae, 1989), the BIS and BAS scales of Carver and White (1994), and then completed the custom-made scale of imprudent behaviour and responded

Results

In assessing statistical significance, the P<.05 level was used throughout.

Table 1 presents the means, S.D., intercorrelations, and Cronbach alphas for each of the measures. Inspection of the table indicates that: (1) with the exception of Imprudent Behaviour, all measures showed reasonable to good internal consistency; (2) Conscientiousness and Self-Control correlated significantly; and (3) the BAS measure correlated significantly with Self-Control but the BIS measure did not.

At the level of

Discussion

The present study sought to determine (1) the extent of overlap between a measure of self-control based on the Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) general theory of crime and standard measures of personality conceptually similar to it, and (2) whether the Self-Control measure is a better predictor of criterion measures relevant to the Gottfredson and Hirschi theory than the personality measures. As far as the question of overlap is concerned, the Self-Control measure was found to correlate

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