Development and Validation of a Goal Characteristics Questionnaire

2021

Article

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How motivated a person is to pursue a goal may depend on many different properties of the goal, such as how specific it is, how important it is to the person, and how actionable it is. Rigorously measuring all of the relevant goal characteristics is still very difficult. Existing measures are scattered across multiple research fields. Some goal characteristics are not yet covered, while others have been measured under ambiguous terminology. Other conceptually related characteristics have yet to be adapted to goals. Last but not least, the validity of most measures of goal characteristics has yet to be assessed. The aim of this study is to: a) integrate, refine, and extend previous measures into a more comprehensive battery of self-report measures, the Goal Characteristics Questionnaire (GCQ; https://osf.io/3gxk5/?view_only=1ff0e62127c64b82862a0fe7d73c4faf), and b) investigate its evidence of validity. In two empirical studies, this paper provides evidence for the validity of the measures regarding their internal structure, measurement invariance, and convergence and divergence with other relevant goal-related measures, such as the motivation, affect, and the dimensions of Personal Project Analysis. The results show that our goal characteristic dimensions have incremental validity for explaining important outcomes, such as goal commitment and well-being. It concludes with practical recommendations for using the GCQ in research on goal-setting and goal-pursuit, and a discussion about directions for future studies.

@article{IwamaDevelopment2021,
  title = {Development and Validation of a Goal Characteristics Questionnaire},
  author = {Iwama, Gabriela and Weber, Felix and Prentice, Mike and Lieder, Falk},
  journal = {Collabra Psychology},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.31219/osf.io/dzhwv},
  url = {https://osf.io/dzhwv/}
}