Abstract
Transactional Analysis assumes that subjective beliefs drive people to act ‘counter scripts’ acquired in childhood in interactions with significant others and that are associated with negative emotions. Those counterscript drivers motivate compensatory behaviors that offset adverse emotions. Given the lack of a theory-based, empirically validated instrument to assess counterscript drivers, we constructed in two studies a 14-item counterscript driver questionnaire. In Study 1 (N = 302) we developed from an initial pool of 144 driver statements in collaboration with 15 subject-matter experts a four factor driver solution via exploratory factor analysis approach. In Study 2 (N = 195), we validated the four factor structure of the drivers via confirmatory factor analysis approach. We then examined predictive validity by regressing the final Driver subscales on the Contingencies of Self-Worth scale (CSW Crocker et al. 2003) and the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS-A-17; De Graaf et al. 2009). Altogether, the questionnaire has acceptable to good psychometric properties and the four subscales representing the drives to “Try Hard”, “Be Perfect”, “Distrust Other People”, and to “Stay Positive” explaining 18–39% of the variance of the external constructs. The Counterscript Driver questionnaire (CSD-14) may be used in various fields of psychology.
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Data Availability
The datasets of this study are available on osf.io: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FK5HU
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Ulrich Kühnen, Johanna Bartels, Martin Harder, Anne Lal and Gregor Rinn as well as all our experts and participants for their great support, thoughts and practical help. We would also like to thank Roland Deutsch for the financial support of Study 2.
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We received financial support in the form of Mind the Gap PartG paying the participant honoraria in Study 1; the third author is affiliated with Mind the Gap PartG.
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Rinn, R., Stamov Roßnagel, C. & Lal, T.N. Development and validation of the counterscript driver questionnaire (CSD-14). Curr Psychol 42, 15967–15977 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00470-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00470-z