Measuring Causal Attributions: The Revised Causal Dimension Scale (CDSII)

Abstract

Although attribution theory continues to be a fertile area of social psychological research, much of the extant literature has suffered from questionable measurement of the constructs of interest. This is especially true in the case of assigning causal attributions placement in theorized dimensional space. Russell's (1982) Causal Dimension Scale represented an important development toward more precise measurement of causal dimensions; however, it has been criticized on a number of fronts. The present report presents the rationale for and initial psychometric properties of a revised version of the scale, the CDSII. Employing data from four studies, a confirmatory factor analysis is reported examining the goodness of fit of the hypothesized four factor oblique structure to the data. The results are discussed in terms of possible applications of the CDSII and the need for further validity testing.