Revising the VIA-Youth: I. Development and interrater convergence

ABSTRACT

The VIA-Youth (Park & Peterson, 2006) is perhaps the most commonly administered youth measure of the Peterson and Seligman (2004) character strengths. This article is the first in a series describing revision of the VIA-Youth, with the goals of making the development process more transparent, targeting scale unidimensionality, achieving measurement invariance, and extending the age range to 8–17. A sample of 286 youth in three countries completed 198 candidate items, from which a 98-item inventory was developed. Ratings of strengths were provided for 250 of the youth by 202 parents and 164 teachers. The relative size of relationships between informants was related to youth age, and to ratings of the observability and evaluativeness of the strengths, in the expected direction. The findings suggest youth self-report of character strengths and ratings by significant others are not highly related, but are consistent with prior studies of informant convergence in youth ratings.

KEYWORDS:

• Character strengths
• VIA-Youth
• unidimensionality
• cross-informant youth ratings
• Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data can be requested from the corresponding author.

Notes

1. A version comprised of three items per scale, the VIA-72, was developed at the same time consisting of the three items on each scale with the highest CITCs, but this version was never extensively used.

Additional information

Funding

The research summarized in this article was funded in part by the VIA Institute on Character. We are grateful to the school personnel who made this study possible. The data and syntax used in analyses described in this article are available upon request to the corresponding author.