Breadth, polarity, and emergence of character strengths and their relevance for assessment

ABSTRACT

Research activity on correlates of character strengths has been steadily increasing in the past years. However, very little is known about basic properties of character strengths, such as their conceptual breadth (narrow versus broader strengths), polarity (unipolar versus bipolar strengths), and emergence (phasic versus tonic strengths). These properties are relevant to the operationalization of character strengths and likely also for related interventions. We therefore asked a sample of N = 249 psychologists to rate the breadth, polarity, and emergence of the 24 character strengths. The results provide a first account of these properties and suggest a considerable variety in them. Our analysis suggests that the content validity of the VIA-IS and VIA-IS-R may be limited as these variety was apparently not sufficiently accounted for in these instruments. We call for further research on such basic properties and propose that these findings are considered for the future assessment of character strengths.

KEYWORDS:

• Character strengths
• content validity
• conceptual breadth
• polarity
• emergence
• phasic
• tonic
• VIA-IS
• VIA-IS-R

Disclosure statement

Willibald Ruch is a Senior Scientist for the VIA Institute on Character, which holds the copyright to the VIA Inventory of Strengths.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.10605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.2018026.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We changed the number of character strengths to be rated from 6 to 8 strengths for each person after a few days of recruiting as we considered this workload appropriate.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been supported by a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation [100014_172723 awarded to WR]. The authors are grateful to Lisa Wagner for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.