Research reportDistribution and gender effects of the subscales of a German version of the temperament autoquestionnaire briefTEMPS-M in a university student population
Introduction
Temperament refers to the enduring constitutional core of behavior and affectivity. Kraepelin (and after him Kretschmer) believed in a continuum between affective disorder and temperament: “Die leichteren und leichtesten Formen gehen ganz unmerklich in gewisse persönliche Eigentümlichkeiten über”. (The weaker and weakest forms [of manic-depressive insanity] imperceptibly pass into certain personal peculiarities, Kraepelin, 1904.)
Akiskal et al., 1998, Akiskal et al., 2005 have developed the TEMPS-A, a new autoquestionnaire for the study of temperament based on the foregoing classic conceptualization. Another German questionnaire version has been shown to have a satisfactory reliability and concurrent validity against the neo FFI (Blöink et al., 2005, this issue). However, they also reported problematic difficulties of a relatively high proportion of items on each scale. It is likely that this leads to unfavorable characteristics of the distribution of values on the respective subscales of the TEMPS-A. Their sample was too small to do full justice to the TEMPS-A. Nevertheless, Blöink et al. reported significant differences between male and female participants on three of the subscales of the long 110-item version of TEMPS-A.
In this issue of the journal, we presented data on the construction of the brief German version of the TEMPS-A (Erfurth et al., 2005). The purpose of this companion paper is to further describe the five subscales of this new measure including distribution, cut-off scores for extreme groups, and gender effects.
Section snippets
Methods
About 1056 students of the Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany, filled out the long version of the TEMPS questionnaire. Details describing the sample and the procedure are given by Erfurth et al. (2005) in this issue. On the whole, the questions were answered very conscientiously. There were not more than 2–3% missing answers for any questions resulting in excellent completion rates for each of the subscales (n=1019 for the hyperthymic, n=1021 for the irritable, n=1022 for the
Results
Histograms of the five subscales of the briefTEMPS-M are shown in Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, Figure 5. As a five-point Likert-type scale was used, the minimal sum score for each subscale is 7×1=7; the highest value is 7×5=35. Means, medians, S.D.s, the 16th and 84th percentiles, estimates of skewness and kurtosis for the five subscales subdivided according to gender are presented in Table 1. Table 2 shows that female participants had higher values on the depressive, the
Discussion
In this paper we described in detail the five subscales of the briefTEMPS-M. Histograms show, that with the exception of the hyperthymic, the full range of the subscales were used in our student sample. Furthermore, skewness and kurtosis values for the five subscales are in a well acceptable range for both men and women. These findings overall are very encouraging, since all degrees of temperament should be found and distributed evenly in the general population.
We were able to confirm gender
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