Development and Validation of the Behavioral Tendencies Questionnaire

At a fundamental level, taxonomy of behavior and behavioral tendencies can be described

in terms of approach, avoid, or equivocate (i.e., neither approach nor avoid). While there are

numerous theories of personality, temperament, and character, few seem to take advantage

of parsimonious taxonomy. The present study sought to implement this taxonomy by

creating a questionnaire based on a categorization of behavioral temperaments/tendencies

first identified in Buddhist accounts over fifteen hundred years ago. Items were developed

using historical and contemporary texts of the behavioral temperaments, described as

“Greedy/Faithful”, “Aversive/Discerning”, and “Deluded/Speculative”. To both maintain

this categorical typology and benefit from the advantageous properties of forced-choice

response format (e.g., reduction of response biases), binary pairwise preferences for items

were modeled using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). One sample (n1 = 394) was used to estimate

the item parameters, and the second sample (n2 = 504) was used to classify the participants

using the established parameters and cross-validate the classification against

multiple other measures. The cross-validated measure exhibited good nomothetic span

(construct-consistent relationships with related measures) that seemed to corroborate the

ideas present in the original Buddhist source documents. The final 13-block questionnaire

created from the best performing items (the Behavioral Tendencies Questionnaire or BTQ)

is a psychometrically valid questionnaire that is historically consistent, based in behavioral

tendencies, and promises practical and clinical utility particularly in settings that teach and

study meditation practices such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).