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Revision of the Self-Monitoring Scale.

1984; American Psychological Association; Volume: 46; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/0022-3514.46.6.1349

1939-1315

Richard D. Lennox, Raymond N. Wolfe,

Behavioral Health and Interventions

Snyder's (1974) Self-Monitoring Scale exhibits a stable factor structure that does not correspond to the five-component theoretical structure he presents.Sets of face-valid items that better approximate the theoretical structure are described.Correlations between these sets of items and measures of other constructs reveal that four of the five components are positively related to social anxiety.Effective social interaction is supposedly the high self-monitor's forte, and social anxiety appears to be incompatible with this.The correlational results therefore question the entire theory and indicate the need for a narrower definition of the construct.Adopting such a definition from Snyder's review article (1979), we present a 13-item Revised Self-Monitoring scale which measures only sensitivity to the expressive behavior of others and ability to modify self-presentation.A 20-item Concern for Appropriateness scale is also described.This scale measures 2 variables that are directly associated with social anxiety-cross-situational variability and attention to social comparison information.Both scales have acceptable internal consistency, and both yield 2 subscale scores as well as a total score.Prospective users of either scale are advised to treat the 3 scores separately.The theory of self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974(Snyder, , 1979) ) presumes consistent patterns of individual differences in the extent to which people regulate their self-presentation by tailoring their actions in accordance with immediate situational cues.If there are such differences and if they can be measured accurately, our understanding of social behavior can be enhanced in important ways.For example, the behaviors of subjects who are high in selfmonitoring should exhibit more cross-situational variability and should be more strongly associated with salient aspects of the proximal perceived environment than should the behaviors of low self-monitoring subjects.Recent tests of the cross-situational variability hypothesis (Arkin, Gabrenya, Appel-