Notes on RBQ revisions
August, 2011
The Riverside Behavioral Q-Sort (RBQ; Funder, Furr & Colvin, 2000) has enjoyed success as a tool for the assessment of behavior at the midlevel of analysis – avoiding micromeasurments such as nods or foot-taps that do little to illuminate the underlying psychological processes that cause them. Recent research, however, examining the relationships between persons, situations, and behaviors has clarified the need for a revision. Originally constructed for measuring behavior in a videotaped, experimental session, the RBQ becomes a less-than-perfect tool when used to describe behaviors of people outside this setting. This is partly due to the presence of items that are not as salient in a generalized setting (e.g., item #1: “Expresses awareness of being on camera and/or in an experiment”), and partly due to the absence of items that might be useful in describing behavior outside of the laboratory.
In order to remedy this, each item was examined with one of three outcomes in mind: to leave it "as is," to modify it, or to delete it. To its credit, 36 of the original 64 items (56.25%) were fine exactly as they were; 27 items (42.18%) were altered in some way, and only 1 item was deleted. 4 completely new items were added, bringing the number of items in version 3.0 of the RBQ up to 67.
This revision was completed by
Notes on RBQ v3.0
October, 2010
Minor clarifications, rewordings, and grammatical fixes were completed in October of 2010. The revision was led by Esther Guillaume in collaboration with David Funder and all the members of the Project. A further minor revision, RBQ 3.11, was completed in July of 2011, also led by Esther Hanes (Guillaume) in collaboration with the other members of the Project.