Tech Articles

Analyses of the VIA Character Skills - McGrath (2014)

The VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) was well-crafted and has emerged as the primary instrument for gauging individual character skills (a.k.a. strengths in VIA parlance) and virtues. Over two million people have completed the VIA-IS self-assessment of their character skills using a 240-question on-line survey, resulting in a large data base. Are the 24 VIA-IS character skills the definitive skills, and are they correctly grouped into the 6 virtues?

Researcher Robert E. McGrath performed a series of statistical analyses (principal components and factor analyses) on VIA-IS survey responses of 458,998 U.S. adults. These analyses suggest some changes to the set of character skills, and raise issues particularly regarding self-assessment.

G E George note: virtues are "factors", character skills are "scales" and the 240 survey questions are "items" in the terminology of this paper. Terminology consistent with zZense.com is used in this zZense Capsule summary.

Alternate Character Skills

The result of item-level analyses suggests an alternate set of 24 character skills. For this alternate set, compared with the original VIA-IS set,

  • 27 of the 240 original survey questions are not used
  • Generally, each skill is associated with some different survey questions than in the original
  • 4 of the original character skills disappeared
    • Leadership -- this construct may inherently comprise multiple character skills, rather than being a single skill itself
    • Gratitude -- most of it's original questions are no longer used, and those questions reflect a variety of facets of gratitude, suggesting they were insufficiently cohesive to survive factor analysis
    • Zest and Hope (Optimism -- although they may be conceptually distinct, at the personal level they tend to collapse into an overall sense of a positive attitude, and their survey questions mostly transfered to the new skill "Positive Attitude" (below)
  • 4 new character skills appeared
    • Positive Attitude ("positivity") -- an amalgam of Zest and Hope
    • Receptivity -- open-mindedness to input from others
    • Future-Mindedness -- tendency to value and think in the long-term
    • Intellectual Pursuits -- broken out from the Love of Learning skill, and meaning actually pursuing learning-related activities such as going to a museum, while the new Love of Learning skill had to do with claimed valuing of learning (ie, "the walk" vs "the talk")
  • 2 character skills changed in meaning from the original intent, to something that seems intuitively off the mark, based on examination of their survey questions. This suggests that better questions might be chosen for these skills
    • Curiosity -- capacity to keep one’s self occupied, rather than a true curiosity
    • Self-regulation -- focused on healthy personal habits such as exercise, rather than a general ability to self-regulate
  • 18 character skills are essentially the same as in the original VIA-IS

Alternate Model (Virtue Grouping)

Factor-level analysis performed on the alternate set of character skills resulted in an alternate set of 5 factors which group the 24 skills, instead of the 6 Virtue groupings of VIA-IS. The 5 factors and associated character skills for each are

  • Interpersonal -- Fairness, Forgiveness, Kindness, Receptivity, Teamwork, Modesty, Love
  • Emotional -- Humor, Social IQ, Creativity, Bravery, Prudence
  • Intellectual-- Intellectual Pursuits, Love of Learning, Beauty, Curiosity
  • Restraint -- Judgment, Perseverance, Perspective, Honesty
  • Future Orientation -- Positive Attitude, Future-Mindedness, Self-Regulation, Spirituality

G E George note: The factor names (just labels, chosen by the author to be plausible) don't always seem intuitively satisfying considering the associated skills. Nonetheless, how interesting and in some cases unexpected -- these groupings of character skills by factor which come out of the statistical analysis.

Overall Take-Away

The work presented in this paper makes interesting suggestions for a second-generation model of character skills. However, as the author mentions, statistical analysis goes only so far, and conceptual analysis is also required.

G E George note: This work is predicated upon the initially-chosen 240 survey questions of the original VIA-IS. Choosing different questions could lead to much different results and suggestions. Nonetheless, this work is a significant analysis of one of the few existing large data bases of it's kind.

An open question is highlighted by this work about self-assessment of character skills using survey questions. To what extent can it predict expected behavioral tendencies? In several cases in this work, self-perception aspects separated from behavioral aspects to define separate character skills.

-g

Source technical article:

McGrath, Robert E. (2015). Scale- and Item-Level Factor Analyses of the VIA Inventory of Strengths. Assessment, vol. 21 no. 1, pp 4-14, February 2014.

On-line article access as of July 2015.

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