Possibleness as a psychological construct: psychometric validation

Abstract

The  objective  of  the  present  study  is  the  psychometrical  approbation  of  the  inventory “Psychological Possibleness of Personality” (PPP) by V.A. Petrovsky, based on his metaimplicative model of existential choice and Boolean algebra (Petrovsky, 2002). The study was conducted on two samples: freshmen psychology students (N=88) and professional models (N=57), who were close on socio-demographics, but radically differed on life style and demands for self-regulation. Besides the Psychological Possibleness of Personality inventory, traditional psychometric inventories for study of personality potential were used: Satisfaction with Life Scale by Diener, General Self-Efficacy Scale by Schwarzer, etc. Six measures of the inventory for two types of tasks were compared, as well as for two samples; analysis of variance for these two variables on the measures of PPP was conducted, as well as correlation analysis of measures of PPP and the two additional scales. It was found that in the sample of models no measure of PPP differs significantly for the two types of tasks, while in the sample of students significant (even highly significant, in most cases) differences are found for all measures, except for the availability of the task. In students correlations of all measures of PPP with satisfaction with life don’t differ significantly for the two types of tasks. Their intention and voluntarism are connected with satisfaction with life positively, with judgment and self-control negatively, while connection with availability and attitude is non-significant. In models there are much less significant correlations; an exception is a significant positive correlation with judgment and a negative one with voluntarism for a task “for one’s liking”. The results allow to speak of the heuristicity of the phenomenological model of possibleness and the construct validity of the inventory PPP.