Toward Development and Measurement of the Interpersonal Power Construct

Summary

This paper reports recent efforts to develop a perceptual measure of the power of another individual in dyadic relationships. The Measure of Interpersonal Power (MIP), containing 34 Likert-type scales, was administered to 306 students at the University of Nebraska, who were instructed to assess the power of an individual in one of four communication contexts: acquaintance, friend, co-worker, family. A series of factor analyses yielded three stable factors---Positive Personal Power, Negative Personal Power, and Reward Power---accounting for 71 percent of the total variance. When a one factor solution was forced, the Positive and Negative Personal Power factors collapsed, as expected, with a reliability of .90 on the factor. The hypothesis that perceptions of interpersonal power would vary across communication contexts was supported.