A preliminary study towards the development of the Turkish form of the California psychological inventory

Abstract

This study was designed to be a preliminary step inthe Turkish standardization process of the CPl. This initialstep was carried out in three phases: 1) the translation ofthe test, 2) the internal consistency study, that is, thecalculation of the item-scale correlation of the English andthe translated Turkish form of CPI, 3) the test-retest reliabilityof the translated Turkish form.In the translation phase, the original inventory wastranslated independently by three bilingual individuals. Thenthese three different translated forms were examined by twobilingual psyhologists and the best translation for each itemwas selected .. The final form was then re-checked by abilingual psychologist whose undergraduate major was Englishlanguage and literature.In the internal consistency phase the original testand the translated form were given to 50 bilingual studentsbetween the ages of sixteen and seventeen. The item-scalecorrelations of the Turkish and the English form were computedseparately by using the point-biserial formula. Inevalating the results Rpb of .27 which was significant at .05level was chosen as a cutting point. The point biserial correlationcoefficients of the items in the Turkish form werequite similar to the coefficients of the items in the Englishform. Dominance, Sociability, Sense of Well-Being andCommunality Scales contained the highest,Achievement via Independence, Psychological Mindedness,Flexibility and Femininity Scales the lowest number of meaningful items.In the reliability study, the Turkish form was giventwice with ten days time interval to twenty subjects agedbetween seventeen and twenty-seven. Pearson Moment CorrelationFormula was used in computing test-retest reliability.The correlation coefficients ranged from .74 to .99with a median correlation of .85.cpr has proven to be a valuable tool in counseling inits country of origin and the present study suggests that itcan also be fruitful in its utilization in Turkey. Furtherresearch will be recommended on the Turkish form. Subsequentstudies may concentrate on improving the individual scalesof the test.