Core Self-Evaluations Scale

Abstract

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) is a widely utilized, psychometrically validated 12-item self-report instrument developed by Timothy A. Judge, Amir Erez, Joyce E. Bono, and Carl J. Thoresen in 2003. The instrument was engineered to provide a direct, parsimonious measure of core self-evaluations (CSE)—a broad, higher-order latent personality construct capturing an individual’s fundamental, subconscious appraisals of their own worth, competence, agency, and overall capability as a person in the world. Historically, CSE was assessed indirectly using a composite battery comprising four established, lower-order personality traits: self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, neuroticism (emotional stability), and locus of control. While informative, this composite approach imposed substantial administrative burden (often requiring up to 40 or more questionnaire items) and suffered from variable psychometric weighting across traits.

The CSES resolves these methodological challenges by directly operationalizing the shared variance underlying these four conceptual domains within a single-factor, 12-item inventory. Respondents rate each statement using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree), with 6 items worded positively and 6 items worded negatively (reverse-scored) to mitigate acquiescence response bias. Psychometric evaluations across diverse collegiate, organizational, and international cross-cultural samples demonstrate exceptional structural integrity and measurement invariance. The scale exhibits robust internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently falling between α = .80 and α = .88, accompanied by solid test-retest reliability (r = .81 over a three-month interval). Extensive confirmatory factor analyses confirm that a unidimensional model provides an optimal fit to empirical data. Furthermore, the CSES demonstrates notable criterion-related validity, serving as an effective predictor of vital organizational criteria including job satisfaction, subjective career success, organizational commitment, stress appraisals, and objective job performance.

Keywords

Core Self-Evaluations Scale, CSES, personality assessment, self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, emotional stability, job satisfaction, job performance, psychometrics

Authors

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a collaborative team of prominent researchers in organizational behavior, industrial-organizational psychology, and psychometrics:

• Timothy A. Judge, Ph.D. – Department of Management, Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida (subsequently affiliated with the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, and Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University). Dr. Judge is recognized for his seminal empirical and theoretical contributions to personality structure, leadership dynamics, job attitudes, and subjective well-being.
• Amir Erez, Ph.D. – Department of Management, Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida. Dr. Erez focuses on behavioral decision-making, workplace affect, performance dynamics, and the psychological impact of rudeness and micro-behaviors within organizations.
• Joyce E. Bono, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota (subsequently Department of Management, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida). Dr. Bono specializes in leadership styles, employee positive personality traits, workplace emotions, and behavioral health.
• Carl J. Thoresen, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Tulane University. Dr. Thoresen has focused on occupational health psychology, employee stress, personality assessment, and advanced quantitative methodologies.

Corresponding inquiries concerning the original scale validation can historically be traced to Timothy A. Judge, with open-access research materials archived across university repositories and personal scientific archives (e.g., University of Florida, University of Notre Dame).

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) is to offer a direct, psychometrically sound, and cost-effective measurement of an individual’s fundamental subconscious evaluations of their own capabilities, personal worth, and agency. Before the inception of the CSES, researchers studying core self-evaluations relied almost exclusively on indirect, composite measurement models. Under this earlier paradigm, investigators administered separate, pre-existing scales for four distinct personality traits: Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (10 items), a Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (typically 8 to 14 items, such as the New General Self-Efficacy scale or Sherer’s scale), a Neuroticism/Emotional Stability scale (often 12 to 24 items from the Eysenck Personality Inventory or the NEO Personality Inventory), and an external/internal Locus of Control scale (such as Levenson’s or Rotter’s scales, consisting of 16 to 28 items).

This composite measurement approach introduced several critical operational and theoretical challenges:

• Excessive Survey Burden: Combining four independent inventories required participants to complete between 40 and 70 questionnaire items merely to operationalize a single overarching construct. This redundancy inflated survey fatigue, increased respondent attrition, and limited the feasibility of including CSE within multi-wave or multi-source industrial studies.
• Disproportionate Weighting and Idiosyncratic Noise: In composite batteries, the unique, idiosyncratic variance of each independent measure—such as domain-specific questions, varied item formats, and differing response anchors—interfered with the identification of common core variance. Scales with more items statistically dominated the latent factor, regardless of whether those surplus items reflected the core construct or trait-specific peripheral noise.
• Construct Invariance and Collinearity: Factor analyses consistently confirmed that the four individual traits were characterized by substantial intercorrelations, often approaching or exceeding r = .60 to .70. When treated as separate simultaneous predictors in multiple regression models, this shared variance caused severe multicollinearity, leading to unstable regression weights and suppressing true effect sizes.

The CSES was specifically developed to bypass these issues by targeting the core shared theoretical essence common to the four traits. By asking direct questions about confidence, personal efficacy, emotional equilibrium, and personal control over life outcomes, the CSES provides organizational researchers, clinical evaluators, and personality psychologists with a 12-item tool that captures this foundational self-appraisal construct in approximately three minutes.

In applied research, the CSES is employed to explore how deep-rooted self-evaluations shape workplace phenomena. Individuals with elevated CSES scores typically perceive challenging job assignments as intrinsically stimulating learning opportunities rather than overwhelming threats. Consequently, they experience greater intrinsic and extrinsic career success, higher job satisfaction, decreased emotional exhaustion, lower turnover intentions, and superior contextual and task performance. In educational, counseling, and clinical contexts, the CSES serves as a diagnostic index of fundamental psychological resilience, self-worth, and perceived locus of causality, identifying individuals who may be at heightened risk for depressive symptoms, learned helplessness, or chronic workplace burnout.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the CSES is Core Self-Evaluations (CSE), conceptualized by Judge et al. (1997, 1998) as a broad, higher-order personality trait that underpins and unifies an individual’s evaluation of their self-worth, capabilities, and locus of control. Rather than functioning as a superficial attitude or a fleeting mood state, CSE reflects an enduring, broad-bandwidth disposition. Grounded in the structural conceptualization of personality taxonomy, CSE reflects the shared intersection among four traditional, lower-order personality traits:

1. Self-Esteem

Self-esteem represents the evaluative component of the self-concept, encompassing an individual’s overall sense of self-worth and self-acceptance. In classic formulations, such as those established by Morris Rosenberg (1965), self-esteem reflects the degree to which a person perceives themselves to be an inherently valuable human being deserving of respect. Within the CSES, self-esteem is reflected in items that probe generalized self-satisfaction and feelings of worthlessness (e.g., Item 4: “Sometimes when I fail I feel worthless” and Item 7: “Overall, I am satisfied with myself”). Rather than measuring narcissistic superiority or contingent self-esteem, the CSES captures basic unconditional self-acceptance.

2. Generalized Self-Efficacy

Generalized self-efficacy represents an enduring, cross-situational belief in one’s broad capabilities to mobilize the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral resources necessary to master diverse life demands. While Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory predominantly operationalizes self-efficacy as a domain-specific, task-contingent belief, personality psychologists established that repeated developmental mastery experiences crystalize into an overarching, dispositional generalized self-efficacy. Within the CSES, this dimension is captured through items such as Item 3: “When I try, I generally succeed”, Item 5: “I complete tasks successfully”, and Item 11: “I am capable of coping with most of my problems”.

3. Emotional Stability (Low Neuroticism)

Neuroticism represents the chronic tendency to experience negative affectivity, including anxiety, depressive dysphoria, self-doubt, vulnerability, and hostility. Conversely, emotional stability describes individuals who are calm, resilient, composed, and even-tempered across environmental stressors. In the framework of CSE, emotional stability acts as the affective foundation for self-evaluation. High CSE individuals possess the emotional equilibrium needed to withstand adverse circumstances without descending into catastrophic thinking or persistent self-doubt. The CSES assesses this stability via items such as Item 2: “Sometimes I feel depressed”, Item 8: “I am filled with doubts about my competence”, and Item 12: “There are times when things look pretty bleak and hopeless to me”.

4. Locus of Control

Locus of control, derived from Julian Rotter’s (1966) social learning theory, reflects an individual’s generalized expectancy regarding the determinants of life events. Individuals who hold an internal locus of control believe that outcomes are largely the direct consequence of their own personal agency, decisions, actions, and effort. In contrast, those with an external locus of control attribute life trajectories to external forces such as fate, luck, systemic barriers, or powerful others. The CSES captures this perceived personal agency through Item 1: “I am confident I get the success I deserve in life”, Item 6: “Sometimes, I do not feel in control of my work”, Item 9: “I determine what will happen in my life”, and Item 10: “I do not feel in control of my success in my career”.

Crucially, Judge and colleagues established that these four historical constructs are not merely distinct traits that happen to co-occur; rather, they represent differing manifestations of a single, deeply rooted, higher-order latent personality trait. Just as cognitive abilities share a pervasive general factor (g), self-appraisal constructs share an overarching latent factor. The CSES captures this shared variance directly, circumventing the construct proliferation and statistical redundancies typical of composite measures.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework guiding the development and application of the CSES is anchored in three principal theoretical paradigms: Judge et al.’s integrated Core Evaluations Model, Social Cognitive Theory, and Cognitive-Perceptual Work Attitude Models.

The Core Evaluations Model

Judge, Locke, and Durham (1997) formulated the Core Evaluations Model to clarify how enduring individual differences directly and indirectly impact work motivation and job satisfaction. At the core of the framework is the premise that individuals do not evaluate reality in an objective vacuum; instead, sensory and environmental inputs are processed through cognitive self-schema. These self-schemas encompass three fundamental psychological criteria:

• Evaluation-Focus: The appraisal involves an active, affective, and cognitive evaluation of the self, rather than a descriptive inventory of one’s physical or behavioral characteristics.
• Fundamental Nature: The appraisal is foundational, underpinning a wide array of localized attitudes, domain-specific judgments, and contextual evaluations.
• Wide Breadth: The appraisal spans all operational domains of living, exerting cross-situational influence across professional, interpersonal, health, and personal environments.

According to this theoretical architecture, people who evaluate themselves positively approach the objective characteristics of their jobs and lives differently from those with negative self-evaluations. They interpret work tasks as inherently meaningful, attribute constructive meaning to ambiguity, and view adverse events as transient obstacles that can be overcome through personal effort and adaptive problem-solving.

Perceptual and Action Mechanisms

The link between core self-evaluations and subsequent life outcomes is mediated by two primary psychological mechanisms: the perceptual mechanism and the action mechanism.

The perceptual mechanism posits that individuals high in CSE possess positive cognitive filters. In studies evaluating the Job Characteristics Model (Hackman & Oldham, 1976), Judge and colleagues found that employees high in CSE reported higher levels of perceived task variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback—even when holding the objective complexity of the job constant. Because they view themselves as capable and worthy, high CSE individuals perceive their surrounding environment as richer, more autonomous, and less threatening.

The action mechanism asserts that high CSE individuals actively shape their environments through behavioral enactment. Drawing on self-concordance theory (Deci & Ryan; Sheldon & Elliot), people with elevated CSE choose goals that are self-concordant—goals intrinsically aligned with their authentic values and genuine interests. Because their goals are driven by autonomous motivation rather than external pressures or neurotic guilt, these individuals demonstrate greater persistence, achieve higher goal attainment rates, and derive greater subjective satisfaction from their achievements.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Core Self-Evaluations Scale has been thoroughly evaluated across multiple empirical investigations involving diverse occupational and cross-national samples. The scale demonstrates robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

During the initial validation program conducted by Judge, Erez, Bono, and Thoresen (2003), the CSES was administered alongside traditional, standalone measures of the four core traits across four separate samples (totaling over 1,400 participants):

• Self-Esteem: Correlated strongly with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (mean r = .74 to .81, p < .001).
• Generalized Self-Efficacy: Correlated significantly with the New General Self-Efficacy Scale (Chen, Gully, & Eden) and Sherer’s General Self-Efficacy Scale (mean r = .65 to .75, p < .001).
• Emotional Stability / Neuroticism: Correlated inversely with the Neuroticism scale of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (mean r = -.64 to -.73, p < .001).
• Locus of Control: Correlated moderately to strongly with Levenson’s Internal, Powerful Others, and Chance scales as well as Rotter’s Internal-External scale (mean r = .40 to .56, p < .001).

Crucially, confirmatory factor analyses verified that the CSES accounted for the variance among these four individual traits more effectively and parsimoniously than a composite measure, demonstrating strong convergence upon the common core construct.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses confirm that the CSES captures a construct distinct from the broader Big Five personality traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience), with the expected exception of its theoretical overlap with Emotional Stability. In multi-trait analyses, the correlations between the CSES and Conscientiousness typically average around r = .30 to .40, while correlations with Extraversion average around r = .35 to .45. Correlations with Agreeableness and Openness are modest (r ≤ .20). When modeled jointly in structural equation models, the CSES consistently forms an independent factor that does not collapse into Conscientiousness or Extraversion, demonstrating that core self-worth and agency are distinct from sociability or task persistence.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The CSES exhibits strong criterion-related validity across a spectrum of behavioral, occupational, and psychological outcomes:

• Job Satisfaction: Meta-analyses and multi-sample validations show that CSES scores consistently predict overall job satisfaction (uncorrected correlations ranging from r = .35 to .45; corrected correlations often exceeding ρ = .50). Longitudinal designs have confirmed that baseline CSES scores predict job satisfaction assessed months and years later, even after controlling for baseline job conditions and objective pay.
• Job Performance: The CSES demonstrates significant predictive validity for both supervisory ratings and objective metrics of job performance (uncorrected r = .20 to .26; meta-analytically corrected ρ = .30). Furthermore, the scale demonstrates incremental validity over cognitive ability and individual Big Five traits in predicting organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and career success.
• Stress and Occupational Well-Being: Individuals scoring low on the CSES report significantly higher levels of subjective work stress, chronic strain, physiological burnout, and somatic symptoms. Conversely, higher CSES scores predict adaptive coping mechanisms, such as problem-focused coping, alongside reduced emotional exhaustion.
• Life Satisfaction and Subjective Well-Being: Beyond the workplace, the CSES exhibits powerful predictive validity for global life satisfaction (r = .45 to .55), displaying meaningful negative associations with clinical depressive symptoms and generalized anxiety.

Reliability

The reliability of the Core Self-Evaluations Scale has been documented across college student samples, working adult populations, and cross-cultural cohorts. Reliability is consistently demonstrated through both internal consistency metrics and temporal stability evaluations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the foundational scale development research by Judge et al. (2003), internal consistency was examined across four independent empirical samples:

• Sample 1 (Undergraduate Students, N = 222): Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was α = .84.
• Sample 2 (Employees from Diverse Organizations, N = 252): Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was α = .83.
• Sample 3 (Professional Engineers, N = 183): Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was α = .85.
• Sample 4 (Healthcare and Administrative Staff, N = 754): Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was α = .84.

Subsequent meta-analytic reviews and global replication studies have confirmed these values, with internal consistency estimates generally falling within the range of α = .80 to α = .88. The scale’s split-half reliability and composite reliability coefficients (ρ_c) frequently exceed .85, confirming that the 12 items reliably sample the underlying construct without introducing substantial random error.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

The temporal stability of the CSES has been supported across diverse retest intervals:

• In Judge et al.’s (2003) validation sample, a subsample of participants was re-administered the CSES across a three-month interval, yielding a test-retest correlation of r = .81 (p < .001).
• Subsequent longitudinal studies spanning one to two years have observed stability coefficients ranging from r = .65 to .75, confirming that while the CSES can reflect meaningful life changes and psychological interventions, it predominantly measures a stable, trait-like disposition over time.

Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the Core Self-Evaluations Scale has been examined using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine whether the instrument measures a single unified construct or multi-dimensional facets.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial item development, Judge et al. formulated a pool of 65 candidate items reflecting self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, emotional stability, and internal locus of control. Through iterative principal components and common factor analyses with varimax and oblique rotations, items with poor communalities, substantial secondary loadings, or low primary factor loadings were systematically eliminated.

The resulting 12-item inventory yielded a clear, dominant single factor. Scree plot inspections across exploratory samples revealed a substantial drop after the first eigenvalue, which accounted for approximately 35% to 42% of the total variance across samples. Item-total correlations for the 12 items uniformly ranged from .42 to .68, satisfying rigorous psychometric criteria for single-factor scale retention.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Judge et al. (2003) and independent researchers (e.g., Bono & Judge, 2003; Gardner & Pierce, 2010; Dormann et al., 2006) tested competing factor structures using maximum likelihood structural equation modeling. The standard models compared include:

1. Single-Factor Model: All 12 items load directly onto a single higher-order core self-evaluations factor.
2. Four-Factor Orthogonal Model: Items load onto four distinct, uncorrelated factors representing self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and locus of control.
3. Four-Factor Correlated Model: Items load onto four correlated factors representing each theoretical facet.
4. Bifactor / Method-Factor Model: A general CSE factor alongside a method factor accounting for the shared variance among the 6 reverse-scored items.

Fit indices from representative CFA studies demonstrate the clear viability of the single-factor structure:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values typically range from .92 to .96, indicating strong relative fit over the baseline independence model.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI / NNFI): Values consistently range from .90 to .95.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range from .048 to .068 (with 90% confidence intervals staying below the acceptable .08 threshold), demonstrating minimal approximation error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values average between .035 and .052, reflecting low residual covariance.

Some psychometricians noted that incorporating an orthogonal method factor for the six reverse-scored items (Items 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12) yields marginal statistical improvements in fit (Δχ², p < .05; CFI > .97, RMSEA ≤ .042). However, factor loadings on the general trait factor remain strong (standardized λ ranging from .45 to .75) even after controlling for this method effect, demonstrating that the single substantive core self-evaluations construct accounts for the items’ primary shared variance.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale is structured as an efficient, self-administered psychological inventory designed to minimize administration burden while preserving psychometric rigor.

• Instrument Name: Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES)
• Developer: Timothy A. Judge, Amir Erez, Joyce E. Bono, and Carl J. Thoresen (2003)
• Construct Assessed: Core Self-Evaluations (CSE)—an integrated, higher-order personality construct encompassing self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, emotional stability, and internal locus of control
• Administration Format: Standard paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based digital survey, or mobile interactive assessment
• Total Item Count: 12 items
• Item Polarity:
  • 6 Positively Keyed Items: Items 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
  • 6 Negatively Keyed (Reverse-Scored) Items: Items 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type scale with the following anchors:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Step 1 (Reverse Coding): Reverse-score items 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 such that (1 becomes 5), (2 becomes 4), (3 remains 3), (4 becomes 2), and (5 becomes 1). In statistical syntax: CSES_rev = 6 - CSES_original.
  • Step 2 (Aggregation): Compute the overall score by calculating the arithmetic mean of all 12 items (or sum the total values). The mean score retains the 1 to 5 metric, where higher composite scores represent higher core self-evaluations.
• Score Interpretation:
  • Scores 1.00 – 2.50 (Low Core Self-Evaluations): Reflects pronounced vulnerability to self-doubt, lower perceived self-worth, an externalized sense of agency, heightened stress susceptibility, and an elevated risk for depressive dysphoria and burnout.
  • Scores 2.51 – 3.75 (Moderate Core Self-Evaluations): Represents typical self-evaluative balance with situational fluctuations in perceived confidence, resilience, and personal control.
  • Scores 3.76 – 5.00 (High Core Self-Evaluations): Indicates robust psychological capital, high personal agency, emotional stability, adaptive coping, high work engagement, and elevated life satisfaction.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 and older across educational, organizational, and general community settings

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale was formally published in 2003 in the journal Personnel Psychology. The scale was established as an open-access psychometric instrument to facilitate academic research, educational inquiry, and applied scientific practice. It is non-commercial, and no licensing fees or royalties are required for non-commercial research, academic theses, dissertations, or educational assessments.

The original instrument was deposited into public university repositories and made accessible via personal academic websites maintained by Dr. Timothy A. Judge and Dr. Joyce E. Bono. Researchers and practitioners are permitted to adapt and administer the scale within academic contexts, provided that standard professional ethical norms and appropriate scientific citations are maintained, referencing the seminal 2003 validation article in Personnel Psychology. Commercial applications, including proprietary automated pre-employment software platforms or fee-based consulting frameworks, may require consultation with the original copyright holders.

References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Bono, J. E., & Judge, T. A. (2003). Core self-evaluations: A review of the trait and its role in job satisfaction and job performance. European Journal of Personality, 17(S1), S5–S18. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.481
• Chen, G., Gully, S. M., & Eden, D. (2001). Validation of a new general self-efficacy scale. Organizational Research Methods, 4(1), 62–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/109442810141004
• Dormann, C., Fay, D., Zapf, D., & Frese, M. (2006). A social cognitive approach to personal initiative: Core self-evaluations and proactive behavior in the workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 882–891. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.4.882
• Gardner, D. G., & Pierce, J. L. (2010). The Core Self-Evaluations Scale: Further tests of validity, dimensionality, and a method effect. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83(1), 283–296. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317909X437433
• Judge, T. A., & Bono, J. E. (2001). Relationship of core self-evaluations traits—self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability—with job satisfaction and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(1), 80–92. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.1.80
• Judge, T. A., Erez, A., Bono, J. E., & Thoresen, C. J. (2002). Are measures of self-esteem, neuroticism, locus of control, and generalized self-efficacy indicators of a common core construct? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(3), 693–710. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.3.693
• Judge, T. A., Erez, A., Bono, J. E., & Thoresen, C. J. (2003). The Core Self-Evaluations Scale: Development of a measure. Personnel Psychology, 56(2), 303–331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2003.tb00152.x
• Judge, T. A., Locke, E. A., & Durham, C. C. (1997). The dispositional causes of job satisfaction: A core evaluations approach. Research in Organizational Behavior, 19, 151–188.
• Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400876136
• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976

Items of the Scale