Children’s Action Tendency Scale (CATS)

Abstract

The Children’s Action Tendency Scale (CATS) is a seminal, vignette-based self-report psychometric instrument developed by Robert H. Deluty (1979) to assess interpersonal conflict resolution, behavioral dispositions, and social decision-making in middle childhood. Specifically constructed for children in grades 3 through 6 (approximately ages 8 to 12), the instrument assesses three distinct yet interrelated behavioral dimensions: Aggressiveness, Assertiveness, and Submissiveness. Comprising 13 ecologically valid situational vignettes representing peer provocation, authority conflict, unfair treatment, and frustration, the instrument operationalizes measurement through a paired-comparison, forced-choice design yielding 39 total paired-item comparisons. In each pairing, respondents must select which of two distinct behavioral alternatives best reflects their likely course of action. Psychometric investigations have demonstrated adequate to strong split-half and internal consistency reliabilities across subscales (split-half coefficients ranging from .70 to .77; test-retest coefficients across a 4-week span ranging from .60 to .75). Extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and behavioral validation studies have confirmed that CATS scores systematically correlate with teacher behavioral ratings, peer sociometric nominations, observational metrics in naturalistic classroom and playground environments, and standardized measures of self-esteem, locus of control, and social anxiety. By separating adaptive assertive conduct from maladaptive aggressive retaliation and passive submissive withdrawal, the CATS remains a foundational instrument in developmental psychopathology, school psychology, behavioral assessment, and the empirical evaluation of social skills training (SST) interventions.

Keywords

Children’s Action Tendency Scale, CATS, childhood aggression, assertiveness, submissiveness, peer conflict, behavioral assessment, social information processing, paired-comparison technique, social competence, middle childhood psychometrics, externalizing behavior, internalizing withdrawal.

Authors

The Children’s Action Tendency Scale was developed and validated by Robert H. Deluty, Ph.D. Dr. Deluty is an American clinical child psychologist and emeritus faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). His scholarly career has focused extensively on developmental psychopathology, interpersonal conflict resolution, cognitive-behavioral assessment and therapy, assertiveness and social competence in children and adolescents, and the psychological differentiation between assertive self-advocacy and hostile aggression.

Purpose

During the 1970s, clinical and developmental psychology experienced a paradigm shift toward behavioral assessment and targeted social skills training for children displaying peer relational difficulties. However, researchers and clinical practitioners encountered a profound methodological obstacle: existing assessment instruments frequently conflated assertiveness with aggressiveness, or failed to capture the nuances of passive, submissive behavior. Adult assertiveness inventories (such as the Wolpe-Lazarus Assertiveness Questionnaire or the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule) relied on adult cognitive frames, linguistic complexity, and social scenarios irrelevant to child populations. Furthermore, simple Likert-scale self-report measures for youth were heavily compromised by extreme social desirability response bias and developmental limitations in metacognitive self-evaluation.

Dr. Deluty designed the Children’s Action Tendency Scale (CATS) to overcome these structural deficiencies. The primary purpose of the instrument is to provide a reliable, ecologically valid, and developmentally calibrated measure of a child’s behavioral dispositions—specifically their action tendencies—when confronted with stressful, frustrating, or conflictual interpersonal encounters. Rather than asking children to make abstract self-evaluative judgments (such as “Are you confident?” or “Do you lose your temper?”), the CATS presents concrete, contextualized narrative dilemmas that mirror everyday school and domestic environments.

The clinical and research applications of the CATS encompass several domains:

• Diagnostic Screening and Clinical Profiling: Identifying children exhibiting elevated externalizing behavioral tendencies (hostile verbal and physical aggression) or debilitating internalizing profiles (passive compliance, emotional submission, tearfulness, and withdrawal).
• Targeting Social Skills Interventions: Assisting clinicians in designing differentiated cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and social skills curricula. Children lacking assertiveness need training in constructive communication, rights assertion, and negotiation, whereas aggressive children require impulse regulation, perspective-taking, and cognitive reframing.
• Evaluating Treatment Efficacy: Providing pre- and post-intervention outcome measurement for behavioral management programs, anti-bullying initiatives, and school-wide socio-emotional learning (SEL) frameworks.
• Developmental and Social-Cognitive Research: Serving as a standard empirical metric for investigating social information processing mechanisms, hostile attributional biases, normative developmental shifts in conflict negotiation, and sociometric peer status dynamics.

Psychological Construct

The CATS measures three core behavioral dimensions within interpersonal conflict situations. Deluty drew upon fundamental principles from behavioral psychology and interpersonal theory to clearly delineate these constructs as conceptually independent options available to a developing child:

1. Aggressiveness

Aggressiveness on the CATS is conceptualized as interpersonal behavior aimed at dominating, punishing, injuring, or depreciating another individual to achieve personal objectives or discharge negative emotional arousal. It represents coercive and hostile reactions that violate the personal boundaries, physical safety, or psychological rights of others. Aggressive action tendencies on the scale encompass both overt physical hostility (e.g., punching a peer who teases, pushing a peer out of line, beating up a younger child who throws a snowball) and verbal/relational hostility (e.g., name-calling, threatening public defamation, screaming at authority figures, retaliatory property sabotage). In the social information processing matrix, aggression signifies an immediate, impulsive retrieval of hostile responses driven by perceived hostility, anger, and a desire for coercive mastery.

2. Assertiveness

Assertiveness is defined as the direct, honest, and prosocial standing up for one’s legitimate personal rights, opinions, and needs while concurrently acknowledging and respecting the rights, boundaries, and feelings of others. Unlike aggression, assertiveness does not seek to demean, inflict harm, or punish the antagonist; rather, it aims for constructive problem resolution, mutual fairness, open communication, and limit-setting. On the CATS, assertive action tendencies are operationalized through verbal boundary setting (e.g., telling peers to stop teasing by appealing to empathy: “Tell them to stop because you wouldn’t like it if I did it to them”), interpersonal negotiation (e.g., offering to trade snacks, proposing collaborative problem-solving), requesting clarification (e.g., asking how a borrowed book became damaged), and constructive persistence (e.g., asking for a second chance to join a game, or practicing to improve future performance).

3. Submissiveness

Submissiveness denotes nonassertive, passive, and self-denying behavioral tendencies wherein the child yields their legitimate rights, permits boundaries to be transgressed, suppresses their needs, or avoids interpersonal friction through flight, capitulation, or emotional collapse. Submissive behaviors sacrifice personal dignity and psychological autonomy to avoid immediate confrontation, disapproval, or conflict. On the CATS, submissive options manifest as passive compliance (e.g., surrendering homework to coercive peers, yielding one’s spot in a water line without protest), withdrawal and avoidance (e.g., quitting a game and going home, walking away hurt), silent suppression (e.g., ignoring personal boundary violations or parental unfairness), and helpless distress reactions (e.g., going home to cry, breaking down into tears when parents issue arbitrary directives).

Theoretical Framework

The development of the Children’s Action Tendency Scale rests upon an integration of Social Learning Theory (Albert Bandura, 1977), behavioral models of assertiveness (Wolpe, 1958; Lazarus, 1971; Alberti & Emmons, 1974), and the early foundational concepts of Social Problem-Solving (D’Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971; Spivack & Shure, 1974), which subsequently evolved into modern Social Information Processing Theory (Dodge, 1986; Crick & Dodge, 1994).

Bandura’s social learning framework posits that children acquire social responses through vicarious modeling, direct reinforcement, and cognitive mediation. Within any given interpersonal dilemma, a child possesses an internal hierarchy of potential response tendencies. Whether an aggressive, assertive, or submissive behavior is emitted depends heavily on cognitive expectancies regarding response efficacy (the belief that an action will achieve a given outcome) and self-efficacy (the belief that one can successfully execute the behavior). Deluty operationalized these response repertoires into distinct “action tendencies”—mental representations of action choices activated under situational stress.

Furthermore, the instrument relies on the psychometric traditions of Louis Leon Thurstone‘s Law of Comparative Judgment. Rather than utilizing isolated Likert-type rating scales (which are vulnerable to acquiescence, social desirability, and developmental scale-anchoring errors in youth), Deluty employed a paired-comparison forced-choice architecture. By forcing respondents to evaluate paired alternatives against one another (Aggressive vs. Submissive, Assertive vs. Aggressive, Submissive vs. Assertive), the CATS minimizes halo effects and social desirability distortions, compelling children to reveal their latent behavioral preferences across systematic, controlled dilemmas.

Validity

The CATS has undergone extensive psychometric validation across multiple independent studies involving diverse clinical, academic, and community cohorts:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Deluty (1979) established initial construct validity by examining associations between CATS self-report scores, peer evaluations, and teacher behavioral ratings among elementary school children. Teachers, utilizing standardized behavior rating inventories, rated students blind to their self-report CATS scores. Children scoring high on the CATS Aggressiveness scale were rated significantly higher by teachers on traits of hostility, disruptive conduct, verbal defiance, and physical intrusiveness ($r = .42$ to $.56, p < .001$). Conversely, CATS Assertiveness scores were positively correlated with teacher-rated leadership, prosocial engagement, and classroom adaptability ($r = .35$ to $.48, p < .01$). The Submissiveness scale correlated positively with teacher ratings of social withdrawal, shyness, and passive avoidance.

Peer sociometrics provided further convergent validation: children identified as aggressive on the CATS received elevated peer nominations for “starts fights” and “mean behavior,” whereas those high in assertiveness were frequently nominated for “plays fair” and preferred as study and play partners. Children high in submissiveness showed strong correlations with peer-rated victimization and neglect.

Behavioral and Observational Validity

In a landmark behavioral validation study, Deluty (1984) assessed children using both the CATS and direct behavioral observations in structured laboratory role-play tasks and naturalistic playground settings. In behavioral role-play tests (BRPT) involving confederate prompts, children’s self-reported action tendencies accurately predicted their actual verbal and behavioral reactions. Highly assertive children on the CATS engaged in constructive, calm boundary defense, maintaining steady eye contact and clear verbalization. Children with high CATS aggression scores displayed loud vocal tones, threatening postures, and aggressive retorts, while those scoring high in submissiveness exhibited averted gaze, nervous mannerisms, and verbal compliance.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by demonstrating that Assertiveness and Aggressiveness represent distinct behavioral dimensions rather than two poles of a single “forcefulness” continuum. Across multiple developmental samples, CATS Assertiveness scores did not correlate positively with externalizing psychopathology or conduct disorder symptom checklists, demonstrating that asserting one’s rights is psychometrically independent of hostile behavioral infringement (Deluty, 1981, 1983).

Reliability

Psychometric evaluations across elementary school cohorts (grades 3–6; ages 8–12) have consistently documented acceptable to strong reliability for the CATS:

Split-Half and Internal Consistency

In the original validation study by Deluty (1979), split-half reliability coefficients (corrected using the Spearman–Brown formula) were calculated for each of the three subscales:

• Aggressiveness: $r_{sb} = .77$
• Assertiveness: $r_{sb} = .74$
• Submissiveness: $r_{sb} = .70$

Subsequent psychometric investigations evaluating Cronbach’s alpha coefficients have confirmed moderate to good internal consistency across age bands: Aggressiveness ($lpha = .72 – .79$), Assertiveness ($lpha = .68 – .76$), and Submissiveness ($lpha = .65 – .73$). Given that the instrument comprises varied situational scenarios across home, peer, and classroom domains, these coefficients indicate solid internal coherence while retaining situational sensitivity.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability was evaluated across a 4-week retest interval among non-clinical elementary school samples (Deluty, 1979, 1981):

• Aggressiveness: $r = .75$ ($p < .001$)
• Assertiveness: $r = .65$ ($p < .001$)
• Submissiveness: $r = .60$ ($p < .001$)

These test-retest coefficients demonstrate strong temporal stability for childhood personality and behavioral action tendencies, while retaining the capacity to reflect systemic changes resulting from clinical intervention or environmental shifts.

Factor Analysis

Initial structural investigations conducted by Deluty (1979) and subsequent confirmatory examinations have supported the theoretical tri-dimensional model of childhood interpersonal response styles:

Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA)

Exploratory factor analyses using principal axis factoring with varimax and oblique rotations on situation response scores consistently yield three distinct, robust factors corresponding precisely to the conceptual subscales:

• Factor 1: Hostile Retaliation / Aggressiveness: Strong positive loadings (ranging from .45 to .78) from overt physical retaliation options (e.g., punching, pushing back, beating up) and retaliatory verbal abuse.
• Factor 2: Constructive Assertion / Assertiveness: Robust loadings (ranging from .42 to .72) from verbal boundary setting, prosocial negotiation, trading offers, and empathy-based limit-setting statements.
• Factor 3: Passive Capitulation / Submissiveness: Clear loadings (ranging from .38 to .69) from immediate flight, compliance, emotional weeping, and conflict avoidance.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Considerations

Because the CATS utilizes a paired-comparison forced-choice framework, total scores display quasi-ipsative properties (each child makes 39 paired selections, with the sum of all chosen options totaling 39). Methodologists examining forced-choice paired comparisons have utilized latent-trait unfolding models and Thurstonian Item Response Theory (IRT) frameworks to verify structural parameters, confirming that the three-factor solution exhibits superior model fit compared to unifactorial (social competence) or bifactorial (externalizing vs. internalizing) models.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Vignette-based behavioral self-report inventory using a paired-comparison, forced-choice format.
• Target Population: Children in middle childhood and early adolescence (Grades 3–6; approximately ages 8 to 12).
• Administration Format: Individual or group pencil-and-paper administration (or digitized equivalent); self-administered or read aloud by an examiner for younger children or those with reading difficulties.
• Administration Time: Approximately 20 to 30 minutes.
• Number of Vignettes & Items: 13 distinct situational conflict vignettes. Each vignette features 3 separate paired comparisons representing the combinations of Aggressive (Agg), Assertive (As), and Submissive (Sub) options, producing a total of 39 paired items.
• Response Scale: Forced-choice selection between two distinct behavioral alternatives (Option ‘a’ OR Option ‘b’) for each paired comparison.
• Scoring Rules:
  • Each choice represents an keyed tendency: Aggressive (Agg), Assertive (As), or Submissive (Sub).
  • When a child selects an option, that corresponding dimension receives 1 point.
  • Subscale raw scores are derived by summing the endorsed items for each category: Aggressiveness Score (0 to 26), Assertiveness Score (0 to 26), and Submissiveness Score (0 to 26).
  • The theoretical sum across all three subscales is invariant ($Agg + As + Sub = 39$). Higher scores on any specific subscale reflect a greater relative behavioral propensity to enact that response mode when confronted with interpersonal frustration.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Children’s Action Tendency Scale was developed and published by Dr. Robert H. Deluty in 1979 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The scale was established as an open-access academic and clinical assessment tool for educational, scholarly, and non-commercial therapeutic use. As published within foundational academic literature and clinical compendiums (e.g., Fischer & Corcoran, 2007), the scale may be reproduced and administered for non-commercial research and clinical evaluation without licensing fees, provided that appropriate bibliographic credit and citation are extended to the author and original copyright holders (American Psychological Association). For commercial adaptation, software integration, or commercial redistribution, permission should be sought through the author and relevant copyright entities.

References

• Alberti, R. E., & Emmons, M. L. (1974). Your perfect right: A guide to assertive living. Impact Publishers.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1978.tb01621.x
• Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
• Deluty, R. H. (1979). Children’s Action Tendency Scale: A self-report measure of aggressiveness, assertiveness, and submissiveness in children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47(6), 1061–1071. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.47.6.1061
• Deluty, R. H. (1981). Assertiveness in children: Some research considerations. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 10(3), 149–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374418109533036
• Deluty, R. H. (1981). Adaptiveness of aggressive, assertive, and submissive behavior for children. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 10(3), 155–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374418109533037
• Deluty, R. H. (1983). Children’s evaluations of aggressive, assertive, and submissive responses. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 12(2), 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374418309533123
• Deluty, R. H. (1984). Behavioral validation of the Children’s Action Tendency Scale. Journal of Behavioral Assessment, 6(2), 115–130. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01323531
• Deluty, R. H. (1985). Cognitive mediation of aggressive, assertive, and submissive behavior in children. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 8(3), 355–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/016502548500800309
• Dodge, K. A. (1986). A social information processing model of social competence in children. In M. Perlmutter (Ed.), Cognitive perspectives on children’s social and behavioral development (pp. 77–125). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• D’Zurilla, T. J., & Goldfried, M. R. (1971). Problem solving and behavior modification. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 78(1), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031360
• Fischer, J., & Corcoran, K. J. (2007). Measures for clinical practice and research: A sourcebook (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 460–463). Oxford University Press.
• Lazarus, A. A. (1971). Behavior therapy and beyond. McGraw-Hill.
• Spivack, G., & Shure, M. B. (1974). Social adjustment of young children: A cognitive approach to solving real-life problems. Jossey-Bass.
• Wolpe, J. (1958). Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Stanford University Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)