Ego development, authoritarianism, and social status: an investigation of the incremental validity of Loevinger's sentence completion test (short form).
This study presents two sets of analyses designed to evaluate the relation between a 12-item form of the Washington University Sentence Completion Test of ego development (Short Form; SCT-S) and socioeconomic status (SES). The subjects were a large national random sample of adolescent and young adult men and women who were stratified into three artificial age cohorts. The first set of hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that SES accounted for 8% to 13% of the variance in SCT-S scores. Incremental validity of the SCT-S in predicting social attitudes, beyond that predicted by SES, was generally supported for authoritarian aggression and partially supported in predicting masculine sex role expectations. Findings suggest that research on ego development with subjects over age 18 might use level of education as a rough index of SES. For younger subjects, parental factors and education are both important. This study also provides revised age-specific national norms for the SCT-S.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001318:Authoritarianism; D004522:Educational Status; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010553:Personality Development; D010556:Personality Tests; D012923:Social Class; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors