Sense of Purpose Inventory: Development, psychometric examination and construct validation

The focus of this dissertation is the measurement of construct purpose. In an earlier study, my colleague and I constructed an instrument titled the Sense of Purpose Inventory (Sharma & Kang, 2013). The aim of this dissertation was to establish the Sense of Purpose Inventory's factor structure, internal consistency reliability, construct validity, and relationship with a measure of social desirability. Data were collected online through survey monkey. The total number of participants was 302 undergraduate students. Exploratory principal axis factoring with varimax rotation was utilized to explore the inventory's factor structure. In the final analysis the three factor solution was considered most conceptually clear, empirically sound, and interpretable. The three factors were labelled as Awareness of One's Purpose, Awakening to One's Purpose, and Desire to Contribute to Wellbeing of Others. Following exploratory analysis, the Sense of Purpose Inventory's internal consistency was explored. The overall inventory demonstrated adequate reliability with .93 as the alpha coefficient. In addition, each factor of the Sense of Purpose Inventory displayed satisfactory reliability with alpha levels ranging from .73 to .92. The construct validity of the Sense of Purpose Inventory was explored by examining the correlations between the scores from the inventory and instruments that measured related and unrelated constructs. These results provided evidence for the inventory's construct validity. Finally, the low correlation between Sense of Purpose Inventory and Social Desirability Scale indicated that Sense of Purpose Inventory's scores' are not associated with impression management. The strengths and limitations of this study are presented. Implications for counseling are discussed, and recommendations are made for future research.