Abstract:

To the best of our knowledge, there is not any questionnaire in Turkish measuring adult temperament that could be used both with the community and clinical samples. Thus, the purpose of the study was to translate The Adult Temperament Questionnaire-Short Form, which has already been translated into several languages, to Turkish and to examine the reliability and validity of the Turkish version. The questionnaire was distributed to 462 university students and adults from different socioeconomic statuses and professions in Ankara. The age of participants ranged from 18 to 65 years (M=22.97). 274 (%59.3) of them were females, 188 (%40.7) of them were males. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to examine construct validity, and also internal consistency reliabilities were calculated. Five factors, namely impulsive negative affect (α = .77), sensory sensitive negative affect (α = .80), extraversion (α =.75), effortful control (α =.75), and sensitivity (α =.83) were extracted after exploratory factor analysis. Impulsive negative affect includes frustration and inhibitory control sensory sensitive negative affect includes discomfort and high-intensity pleasure extraversion includes positive affect and sociability effortful control includes attentional control and activation control and sensitivity includes general perceptual sensitivity, associative perceptual sensitivity, affective perceptual sensitivity, and sadness. Internal consistency coefficients ranged from .60 to .79. The correlations between the factors of temperament scale and personality traits were significant. The current findings suggested that The Adult Temperament Questionnaire-Turkish version had acceptable levels of reliability and validity. Thus, this scale can be used with Turkish samples.

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