Contents
The development of the Scientific Center of the International Association of Personality Development Professionals is described.
Introduction
One of the aspects of a person’s perception of a situation in practical psychology is described by the concept of «position of perception».
There are five main, classic positions:
Zero position
This position was historically added after the first ones (hence the number) and denotes their absence. The zero position consists in a stereotyped reaction, submission to external forces, requirements, standards, traditions, one’s own habits and social stereotypes.
First position
Orientation to own, personal interests, initiatives, needs, desires.
Second position
Understanding and taking into account the interests, needs and desires of the interlocutor, partner.
Third position
A detached look «from the outside», assessing the situation as objectively and impartially as possible.
Fourth position
Summarizing previous approaches, systemic view. This position, being synthetic, is rarely used in analysis.
Methods
In order to identify the prevailing positions in the reactions of the respondent, we compiled a questionnaire, each of the questions assumed the answers “I do not agree completely”, “I do not agree in general”, I rather disagree than I agree, I rather agree than I disagree”, I mostly agree, I agree completely.
The questionnaire was submitted via the Internet to 530 respondents aged 12 to 65, 351 women and 179 men. At the same time, they were presented with questions on the scales “Social empathy” (Megrabian-Epstein), “Authoritarianism” (from the Leary questionnaire), “Egoism” (from the Leary questionnaire), “Subordination” (from the Leary questionnaire), “Dependence” (from the Leary questionnaire) , «Emotionality» (Shmishek’s questionnaire).
After excluding invalid questions and questions with excessive intercorrelation or correlation with extraneous scales, a questionnaire was compiled of 64 questions with intercorrelation coefficients
In the process of test validation, splitting of distributions on scales of I and II positions was found. The analysis showed that the issues that affect splitting are divided into two categories: the first includes the I and II positions proper as skills, abilities and abilities, and the second includes uncontrolled exposure to the influence of one’s own desires and the influence of a partner, respectively.
These additional scales were named n1 and n2.
Passive first position
Uncontrolled dependence on one’s own, personal interests, needs, desires, the psychological need to make them the first priority.
Passive second position
Uncontrolled dependence on the interests, needs and desires of the interlocutor, partner, exposure to external influence.
Thus, the resulting set of scales was divided into two triads:
Scales I, II and III as active, controlled skills, abilities, skills and
Scales O, n1 and n2 as uncontrolled passive dependencies.
Table 1. Influence of responses on the final set of scales when calculating the result.
All correlation coefficients between score columns
Results and their processing
1456 respondents aged 12 to 70, 1025 women and 431 men, answered this questionnaire in this way.
The answers “I do not agree completely”, “I do not agree mostly”, I rather disagree than I agree”, I rather agree than I do not agree”, I agree in general”, I agree completely” were assigned the values -3, -2, -1, 1 , 2, 3, respectively. For each scale, these values were multiplied by the coefficient of influence corresponding to the scale and summed up.
The “raw” results were divided by percentiles divisible by 10, according to which they were stenised in the range of 0..9 without taking into account the gender and age characteristics of the sample.
Table 2. Stening table.
If the raw score lies between the current line and the next, then the walled value is equal to the current line number.
Table 3. Correlation coefficients between scales of the questionnaire.
Separately, for groups corresponding to the average for the lower and upper halves of each scale, the average values of the remaining scales were calculated, which made it possible to visually assess the correlation between the scales and evaluate the characteristic features of each group.
Table 4. Average scale values for low and high scores on each scale.
Table 5. Charts representative of high and low values on each scale.
As follows from the correlations, the scales of the upper triad are somewhat related to each other, as are the scales of the «lower» triad, except for the n1 scale. This suggests the possibility of using a questionnaire to determine the activity of a vital position.
Application
The questionnaire «Positions of perception» allows assessing the typical perception of a communicative situation by the respondent in six positions of perception, four standard and two additional, being a convenient diagnostic research tool in the field of personality psychology and communication psychology.