goodknight411:
Gee I seem to be motivated tonight.
Anyhow. Here's the breakdown for divers only.
Interesting "extreme S" result. Makes you wonder why divers in general are not walking talking poster children for the spectrum of autistic and pervasive developmental disorders.
I have noted on other scales that I tend to be pretty balanced, but I am pretty sure I was not born that way. I think a lot of it has to do with my career field and training as a counselor. But then the counter argument would be that I was attracted to my field because I was born that way. Maybe both.
I also wondered to what degree individual responses may have been subject to some degree of falsification as the scales were pretty face valid. People would be prone to answering questions on how they would like to be perceived or how they would aspire to be based on their value systems rather than how they are, and I think this could be particularly true for technical divers, pilots, engineers, etc where analytical reasoning and technical skills are perceived as being more valued than touchy feely skills.
It's probably a better explanation for the high extreme S scores than a much higher than average inclination among the population studied toward anything on the autistic spectrum.
Still it is very interesting. I am just finishing a paper on Autistim and PDD in regard to Rehabiltation Counseling and may add some discussion based on the work you cited.
TheDivingPreacher:
Many times I had to choose the "slightly" option only because of the use of adverbs like, always, usually, often.......
Avoiding the extremes is a common phenomenon on any Likert scale and has to be accounted for in the development of the instrument. In this case I suspect the words like "always", "never", "usually" and "often" are being used to help differentiate between agree/strongly agree and disagree/strongly disagree respondents.