BALANCED INVENTORY OF DESIRABLE RESPONDING - FACTOR STRUCTURE, RELIABILITY, AND VALIDITY WITH AN OFFENDER SAMPLE

The psychometric properties of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Res ponding (BIDR) were examined with 539 incarcerated male offenders. Con firmatory factor analysis of the BIDR resulted in a three factor solut ion of Impression Management, Denial of the Negative,and Over Confiden t Rigidity with scale score coefficient alphas of 0.84, 0.73, and 0.58 , respectively. External validity was demonstrated by comparing scale differences (a) between offenders admitting their offences with nonadm itting offenders, (b) intake vs release offenders, and (c) with a theo retically relevant item from Hare's Psychopathy Checklist. To further examine the convergent and discriminant validity, the BIDR scales were compared with other response style measures of Denial, Social Desirab ility, Person Reliability, number of true keyed responses, and number of false keyed responses derived from the Basic Personality Inventory. Also included was the Satiation Scale, a measure of test taking attit udes. The overall results suggest that the BIDR has utility in the mea surement of socially desirable responding with offenders. The implicat ions of these results for interpreting offenders' self-report assessme nts are discussed. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.