VALIDATION OF THE MILLER BEHAVIORAL STYLE SCALE (BEHAVIORAL STYLE, COGNITIVE INFORMATIONAL STYLE).
Contributors: University of Alberta.
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 326
Subjects: Education, Guidance and Counseling.; Psychology, Psychometrics.; Psychology, Behavioral.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The Miller Behavioral Style Scale (MBSS) was designed to identify the individual's cognitive informational style (CIS) based on self-reported preferences for information seeking strategies (monitoring) and distraction (blunting) in 4 hypothetical stress-evoking situations. The MBSS may have implications in terms of guiding nursing practice in the future. The identification of the patient's CIS may lead to a better match between nursing interventions and the informational needs of the patient awaiting threatening procedures. Unfortunately, the validity evidence of the MBSS is limited. The present study was undertaken to further extend and evaluate the validity evidence of the MBSS.

A critical analysis of the following was integrated to formulate an evaluative judgement of the degree of validity of the MBSS: (i) theoretical underpinnings of the MBSS, (ii) content and scoring model of the MBSS, (iii) previous work using the MBSS, and (iv) new empirical evidence generated in this research.

Five substudies were designed to develop appropriate tools and to examine aspects of the substantive, structural, and external validity of the MBSS. In Substudy I the MBSS was administered to 271 university students to examine the structure of the MBSS. Substudies II to IV were undertaken to develop and test a new set of 8 hypothetical stress-evoking situations. Using a subsample of 60 of the 271 students, interview responses to the 8 new situations and 1 of the MBSS situations were examined in Substudy V.

Overall the validity evidence is weak. A major inconsistency between the underlying theory and the MBSS concerns the dimensionality of CIS. A lack of strong predictive validity evidence may in part be due to a lack of consistency in MBSS scoring models used among researchers. A lack of strong structural validity evidence may in part be due to a number of problematic items in the MBSS. Only the scores on distracting (blunting) in the MBSS were positively related to the scores on distracting in the interview data. However, content analysis of the interview data indicate that the broader concept of blunting may be underrepresented in the MBSS. Furthermore, the structural approach used in the MBSS may be inappropriate given that coping with threat appears to be a process.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-07, Section: A, page: 1831.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA (CANADA), 1993.

School code: 0351.
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