Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-P)

Abstract

The Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-P) is an established psychometric instrument designed to assess individual differences in children’s regulatory styles and motivational orientations underlying prosocial behavior. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT)—specifically Organismic Integration Theory formulated by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci—the scale investigates the perceived locus of causality governing moral, empathetic, and cooperative actions among youth in late elementary and middle school settings. Developed alongside its sister instrument, the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-A), by Richard M. Ryan and James P. Connell (1989), the SRQ-P operationalizes a continuum of internalization encompassing three distinct regulatory dimensions: external regulation (acting to avoid disciplinary punishment or secure tangible social rewards), introjected regulation (acting to avoid guilt, shame, or self-derogation, or to maintain contingent self-worth), and identified regulation (acting out of personal valuation, conscious endorsement of moral goals, and perceived interpersonal importance). Unlike academic or leisure motivation inventories, the SRQ-P deliberately excludes an intrinsic motivation subscale, reflecting the developmental premise that socialization and prosocial actions originate from interpersonal transmission, internalizing external moral expectations rather than spontaneous hedonic enjoyment.

The questionnaire consists of 24 items structured across scenarios representing prototypical prosocial behaviors: promise keeping, refraining from peer ridicule, anger management/non-violence, general kindness, and helping individuals in distress. Responses are recorded on an age-appropriate 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“Not at all true”) to 4 (“Very true”). Extensive psychometric evaluations demonstrate sound construct, convergent, and discriminant validity, alongside robust internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging from .65 to .83 across regulatory subtypes). The instrument exhibits a quasi-simplex correlation pattern that serves as foundational empirical verification for the continuum of self-determination, rendering the SRQ-P an essential tool in developmental, social, and educational psychology.

Keywords

Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire, SRQ-P, Self-Determination Theory, Organismic Integration Theory, Prosocial Behavior, Internalization, Perceived Locus of Causality, External Regulation, Introjected Regulation, Identified Regulation, Moral Development, Child Psychology

Authors

The Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire was conceptualized, developed, and psychometrically validated by:

• Richard M. Ryan, Ph.D. — Professor of Clinical and Social Psychology at the University of Rochester (Emeritus), currently Professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. Dr. Ryan is co-founder of Self-Determination Theory and has authored seminal literature on human motivation, personality development, and well-being.
• James P. Connell, Ph.D. — Developmental psychologist formerly at the University of Rochester and co-founder of the Institute for Research and Reform in Education (IRRE). Dr. Connell is renowned for his empirical investigations into child competence, autonomy, self-system processes, and educational reform.

Inquiries regarding the theoretical architecture and research usage of the Self-Regulation Questionnaires can be directed through the Center for Self-Determination Theory (CSDT) at its open-access repository (selfdeterminationtheory.org).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-P) is to evaluate the developmental and psychological processes through which children internalize cultural and societal demands for prosociality. In developmental and social psychology, observing whether a child engages in altruistic actions—such as comforting a distressed peer, honoring a verbal agreement, or controlling aggressive impulses—provides incomplete clinical and theoretical information. Two children may exhibit identical prosocial conduct on the playground, yet operate under fundamentally divergent motivational engines: one child acts out of intense dread of adult surveillance and fear of corporal reprimand, whereas the other acts out of authentic, identified empathy and personal alignment with the values of kindness and mutual respect.

The SRQ-P addresses this critical explanatory gap by dissecting the underlying “why” behind prosocial acts. Specifically, the instrument fulfills several clinical, applied, and empirical functions:

• Diagnostic Differentiation of Moral Autonomy: In school psychology and child guidance clinics, the SRQ-P permits practitioners to distinguish between compliant or heteronomous morality (dependent on adult policing and reward contingencies) and autonomous self-regulation. This distinction is vital when assessing youth presenting with conduct difficulties, oppositional behaviors, or extreme social anxiety related to perfectionism and chronic guilt.
• Evaluation of Character Education and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL): Educational institutions frequently implement programs designed to foster empathy, anti-bullying norms, and prosocial citizenship. The SRQ-P serves as an evaluative pre- and post-intervention metric to determine whether interventions genuinely promote internalized moral values (identified regulation) or merely cultivate sophisticated impression management and external compliance strategies.
• Investigating Developmental Antecedents and Parenting Dimensions: Developmental researchers utilize the SRQ-P to analyze how parenting styles (e.g., parental autonomy support versus psychological control) predict children’s internalization of altruism. Autonomy-supportive parenting correlates strongly with identified prosocial regulation, whereas controlling parenting yields high introjection and external contingency.
• Elucidating Psychological Well-Being Outcomes: The instrument facilitates cross-sectional and longitudinal research into how differing regulatory styles impact child affective well-being. Empirical findings demonstrate that whereas identified prosocial regulation promotes positive peer sociometrics and emotional resilience, introjected prosocial regulation is often linked to internalized distress, moral self-deprecation, and chronic anxiety.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the SRQ-P is the Perceived Locus of Causality (PLOC) for prosocial behavior. In classical developmental literature, social behaviors were often classified dichotomously as either intrinsically driven or externally reinforced. However, within the framework of Organismic Integration Theory, motivation is conceptualized as a graded multidimensional continuum spanning varying degrees of autonomy and internalization.

The SRQ-P measures three specific subscales across five critical prosocial behavioral domains: keeping promises, abstaining from peer ridicule, inhibiting aggressive reactions when provoked, maintaining generalized interpersonal kindness, and providing assistance to individuals in distress. The construct dimensions include:

1. External Regulation

External regulation sits at the least autonomous end of the internalization continuum. Behaviors governed by external regulation are performed entirely to satisfy external demands, secure tangible social rewards, gain peer or adult approval, or avoid explicit negative consequences such as disciplinary reprimands, parental punishment, or social ostracism. For example, a child may refrain from striking an adversary not because they value bodily integrity, but strictly because they fear being sent to the principal’s office (“Because I’ll get in trouble if I do”). In the social domain, external regulation also encompasses instrumental compliance aimed at manipulating social approval, such as being helpful solely so that peers will grant reciprocal favors or transactional friendship.

2. Introjected Regulation

Introjected regulation represents a partial, incomplete form of internalization wherein external behavioral standards are swallowed whole without being assimilated into the core self. Although the regulatory forces are internal to the person, they remain functionally alien and psychologically coercive. Actions are driven by internally administered sanctions: self-esteem contingencies, ego-involvement, guilt avoidance, moral self-flagellation, and fear of shame. When acting under introjected prosocial regulation, a child assists a classmate primarily to escape feeling like a “bad person” (“Because I’d feel bad about myself if I didn’t”) or to defend a precarious sense of moral superiority. While introjection produces reliable behavioral compliance in the short term, it introduces substantial internal friction, intrapsychic conflict, and psychological vulnerability.

3. Identified Regulation

Identified regulation reflects a highly autonomous and integrated form of extrinsic motivation. Here, the child has consciously evaluated and accepted the underlying value and importance of the prosocial act. The behavior is perceived as an authentic reflection of personal convictions and social commitments. When helping someone in distress, the identified individual does so because they genuinely perceive helping as meaningful, vital, and socially congruent (“Because I think it’s important to give help when it’s needed”). Identified regulation is characterized by a psychological sense of volition, ownership, endorsement, and stability across varied contextual circumstances, even in the absence of external monitoring.

The Absence of an Intrinsic Motivation Subscale

A notable conceptual characteristic of the SRQ-P is the theoretical omission of an intrinsic motivation subscale. In Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation refers to engaging in an activity purely for its inherent novelty, intellectual challenge, or hedonic enjoyment (e.g., exploratory play, creative drawing). Prosocial behaviors, by their foundational developmental nature, are initiated through social transmission and interpersonal socialization; they are tasks that society requests children to adopt rather than spontaneous leisure pursuits. Consequently, the highest realistic level of autonomous self-regulation for these socialized behaviors is identified regulation, where the value of the action is internalized into the individual’s value hierarchy.

Theoretical Framework

The Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire is situated within Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a comprehensive macro-theory of human personality, motivation, and psychological wellness established by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Specifically, the SRQ-P directly tests and validates Organismic Integration Theory (OIT), a mini-theory within SDT that focuses on the continuum of internalization and the differentiation of extrinsic motivation.

The Organismic Integration Process

OIT operates under the organismic assumption that human beings possess an innate, natural tendency toward psychological growth, personal integration, and social coherence. Children are active organisms naturally disposed to assimilate social practices and cultural customs into their coherent sense of self. However, this natural trajectory toward integration is fundamentally dependent upon social-contextual nutriments. When the surrounding social environment (parents, educators, peers) satisfies the child’s three basic psychological needs—Autonomy (experiencing oneself as the origin of one’s actions), Competence (feeling effective in interacting with the social environment), and Relatedness (feeling connected to and cared for by significant others)—internalization proceeds smoothly from external compliance to identified integration.

Conversely, when social environments employ controlling, coercive, or conditionally affectionate parenting techniques, the internalization process is stymied. The child may adopt the behavior to preserve security or relatedness, but the regulatory mechanism becomes arrested at the introjected or external stage, yielding compliance burdened by emotional strain.

The Perceived Locus of Causality (PLOC)

The SRQ-P operationalizes Fritz Heider’s classic attributional concept of locus of causality, as modernized by Ryan and Connell (1989). Rather than examining whether an individual attributes causal origin to internal traits versus external environments after the fact, the PLOC construct assesses the phenomenal source of initiation and regulation *prior to* and *during* the execution of action. External regulation is perceived as having an External Perceived Locus of Causality (E-PLOC), whereas identified regulation reflects an Internal Perceived Locus of Causality (I-PLOC). Introjected regulation occupies an intermediate, theoretically fascinating threshold: it is physically internal to the individual’s mind, yet phenomenologically experienced as externally compelled and non-volitional.

Validity

The validity of the Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire has been established across multiple independent psychometric investigations involving diverse pediatric and adolescent cohorts.

Construct and Structural Validity (Quasi-Simplex Pattern)

The primary validation benchmark established in the seminal Ryan and Connell (1989) investigation rests upon the demonstration of a quasi-simplex pattern among the inter-subscale correlation matrix. According to psychometric simplex theory, when constructs fall along an underlying ordered continuum (the autonomy continuum), variables adjacent on the conceptual continuum must exhibit higher positive correlations with each other than with variables positioned further away. Empirical testing confirmed this theoretical formulation: external regulation correlated moderately and positively with introjected regulation (with correlation coefficients typically around r = .35 to .48), while showing negligible or negative correlations with identified regulation (r = -.10 to .15). Concurrently, introjected regulation showed substantial positive correlations with identified regulation (r = .40 to .55). This ordered pattern provides unequivocal structural evidence that children organize the reasons for their moral actions along a dimensional continuum of self-determination.

Convergent and Divergent Validity

Convergent validity has been repeatedly substantiated through correlations with independent socio-cognitive and behavioral indices:

• Empathy and Perspective Taking: Identified prosocial regulation correlates strongly and positively with measures of dispositional empathy, emotional perspective taking, and higher stages of moral reasoning as assessed by Kohlbergian dilemma metrics and Eisenberg’s prosocial reasoning scenarios (r typically exceeding .45, p < .001). Conversely, external regulation demonstrates null or inverse correlations with perspective-taking capacity.
• Peer and Teacher Sociometric Nominations: In sociometric analyses, children high in identified regulation receive significantly higher peer nominations for being trustworthy, helpful, and cooperative, alongside higher teacher ratings of classroom citizenship. Children scoring predominantly high in external regulation are rated by peers as more untrustworthy or transactional in their social alliances.
• Affective Experience and Well-Being: Distinct divergent validity profiles emerge regarding psychological distress. Introjected regulation is uniquely predictive of post-behavioral anxiety, social-evaluative concern, and depressive affect. When children act prosocially primarily out of introjection, failure to meet expectations induces severe self-blame, confirming that introjection is distinct from genuine identified autonomy.

Reliability

The SRQ-P demonstrates consistent internal consistency and temporal stability metrics across late childhood and early adolescent populations (typically ages 8 to 14 years).

Internal Consistency

In the foundational psychometric studies conducted by Ryan and Connell (1989), internal consistency was determined using Cronbach’s alpha across elementary and middle school samples:

• External Regulation Subscale: Alpha coefficients consistently range between .72 and .81, indicating solid item-to-subscale cohesion in capturing avoidance of punishment and pursuit of extrinsic reward across diverse social scenarios.
• Introjected Regulation Subscale: Alpha coefficients range between .68 and .79, demonstrating that items capturing internal shame, guilt avoidance, and moral self-recrimination cohere reliably.
• Identified Regulation Subscale: Alpha coefficients range between .70 and .82, showing high internal reliability for statements measuring the valuation and personal importance of moral conduct.

Temporal Stability

Test-retest evaluations over intervals of 4 to 8 weeks yield stability coefficients between r = .64 and r = .78 across all three subscales, confirming that while regulatory orientations can adapt to systematic environmental shifts (such as classroom climate interventions), they function as relatively stable individual difference orientations during middle childhood.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have been conducted on the SRQ-P to verify its latent dimensionality and structural integrity.

Exploratory Factor Analyses

Initial principal components analyses utilizing varimax and oblimin rotations confirmed that items cleanly dissociate into three primary factors corresponding directly to the theoretical regulatory categories: External, Introjected, and Identified regulation. Item loadings onto their designated regulatory factors consistently exceed .45, with cross-loadings onto non-target factors generally remaining below .25. Importantly, factor analyses conducted across separate behavioral vignettes (e.g., helping vs. promise keeping vs. non-violence) demonstrate that variance is driven primarily by the regulatory style rather than the specific behavioral prompt, verifying that regulatory orientations operate trans-situationally across prosocial domains.

Confirmatory Factor Analyses and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations have contrasted a single-factor general compliance model, a two-factor autonomous vs. controlled model, and the hypothesized three-factor continuum model. The three-factor latent structure demonstrates superior model fit across standard goodness-of-fit metrics:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values regularly exceed .92 to .95.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently range between .91 and .94.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates typically fall between .042 and .058, well within the boundary for acceptable to good model fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values consistently remain under .06.

Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses also confirm measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar) across gender groups and across late elementary versus middle school grade cohorts, establishing that the underlying construct is interpreted symmetrically across developmental stages.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire is an objective, paper-and-pencil or digital self-report inventory specifically constructed for pediatric administration.

• Target Population: Children in late elementary and middle school (grades 3 through 8, approximately ages 8–14 years).
• Item Format: The scale presents five contextual behavioral stem prompts followed by a series of candidate reasons reflecting external, introjected, or identified motivations.
• Total Item Count: 24 validated items.
• Response Scale: 4-point Likert-type response format formatted deliberately to facilitate child comprehension, sequenced as:
  • Very true (Scored as 4)
  • Sort of true (Scored as 3)
  • Not very true (Scored as 2)
  • Not at all true (Scored as 1)
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • External Regulation Subscale: Items 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 23.
  • Introjected Regulation Subscale: Items 2, 7, 14, 18, 22.
  • Identified Regulation Subscale: Items 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24.
• Scoring Options:
  • Subscale Mean Scores: Calculated by averaging the items corresponding to each regulatory subtype. This yields an independent continuous score for External, Introjected, and Identified regulation.
  • Relative Autonomy Index (RAI): A composite metric reflecting the child’s overall degree of self-determination in the prosocial domain. Weights are applied based on the simplex continuum:
    RAI = (2 × Identified) - (1 × Introjected) - (2 × External)
    Higher positive scores denote predominantly autonomous prosocial regulation, whereas negative scores indicate predominantly controlled regulation.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Prosocial Self-Regulation Questionnaire was originally published in 1989 within the classic study by Richard M. Ryan and James P. Connell in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Copyright and Usage Permissions: The SRQ-P is in the academic public domain for scientific, educational, and clinical non-profit research. Under the open-science stewardship of the Center for Self-Determination Theory (selfdeterminationtheory.org), researchers and educators are granted royalty-free permission to utilize, administer, translate, and reproduce the instrument for non-commercial research endeavors without paying licensing fees, provided proper formal academic attribution is accorded to Ryan and Connell (1989).

References

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
• Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., & Spinrad, T. L. (2006). Prosocial development. In N. Eisenberg, W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development (6th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 646-718). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0311
• Grolnick, W. S., & Ryan, R. M. (1989). Parent styles associated with children’s self-regulation and competence in school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81(2), 143-154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.81.2.143
• Roth, G. (2008). Development of autonomous self-regulation for prosocial behavior: The role of parents and teachers. In M. Roth (Ed.), Educating for values and character (pp. 55-72). Hebrew University Press.
• Ryan, R. M., & Connell, J. P. (1989). Perceived locus of causality and internalization: Examining reasons for acting in two domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(5), 749-761. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.5.749
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press. https://doi.org/10.1521/978.14625/28768

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)