Psychometric validation of the Cognitive Appraisal of Risky Events-Antisocial/Prosocial (CARE-A/P) scale

This study aimed to provide further psychometric validation to the CARE-AP (Cognitive Appraisal of Risky Events-Antisocial/Prosocial, Halaby, 2007), which is a revised version of the CARE scale (Fromme, Katz, & Rivet, 1997) on a set of prosocial risky behavior. The first goal of this study was to verify the 2-factor structure of the CARE-AP, as previously found by Halaby (2007). The second goal was to assess the construct validity of the CARE-AP factors, which was done using the Ant (Antisocial) scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 1991) for the Antisocial factor, the Adult Prosocialness Scale (APS, Caprara et al., 2005) for the Prosocial factor, and the Sensation Seeking Scale-V (SSS-V, Zuckerman, 1994) for the CARE-AP full score. The final goal was to explore gender differences on the CARE-AP by determining whether gender-based samples would lead to different factorial solutions. The sample included 353 participants, and was supplemented at times by a previously collected sample of 221 participants. Exploratory factor analyses confirmed the presence of two factors. The gender analyses had comparable solutions, which pointed to the existence of a unified structure for the CARE-AP. Small significant correlations were found between the Ant scale and the Antisocial factor, as well as the SSS-V and the total score for two of the three outcome measures (EB and EI). The APS was significantly correlated to the Prosocial factor for one of the outcome measures (EB). Although our hypothesis for construct validity did not generalize for all three outcome measures, the results were in the predicted direction. Limitations and implications for future research were discussed.