A balanced measure of attributional style

Abstract

A New measure of attributional style, the Balanced Attributional Style Questionnaire (BASQ), is described in which the positive and negative items are matched for content. The BASQ requires subjects to write down the major cause for each of eight good events and eight bad events, equally divided into achievement and affiliation situations. Subscale scores can be obtained for the rated internality, stability, and globality of the reported causes and for the importance of the situations, and composite measures of attributional style can also be derived. These scores are shown to have respectable psychometric properties (inter-item reliability, test-reliability, validity) encouraging further use and development of the BASQ in a variety of settings.