Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol 43, Issue 4 311-321, Copyright © 1981 by American Psychosomatic Society

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Validation of the type A interview assessment of adolescents: a multidimensional approach

JM Siegel, KA Matthews and CJ Leitch

The Adolescent Structured Interview (ASI), adapted from the interview that assesses Type A behavior of adults, was administered to 204 adolescents. These adolescents also completed a battery of self-report questionnaires that measured the three major components of Pattern A: competitive achievement-striving, speed and impatience, and aggressiveness-hostility. In addition, items was constructed to measure efforts to control which have been hypothesized to underlie the major manifestations of Type A behaviors. The ASI content and speech ratings were subjected to factor analytic procedures, and the relationships between the major factors, interview behaviors, impatience, and harddriving, and the appropriate test scores were examined. Dichotomization of the three factor score distributions and subsequent t-tests indicated that the factor scores have discriminative ability and are related as expected to the appropriate self-report measures of Type A behaviors. Of the three factors identified, the interview behaviors factor was most highly correlated with interview classification, while the two content factors yielded much weaker associations. Apparently, the component scores of the ASI provide unique information, in terms of relationships with relevant dependent measures, that is not provided by the interview classification alone.