Reliability and validity of the Self‐Reflection and Insight Scale for psychologists and the development and validation of the revised short version

Abstract

Self‐reflection is broadly considered a core competency for psychologists; however, there is an absence of measures of self‐reflection, limiting the extent to which self‐reflection can be assessed in both research and practice contexts. Whilst the Self‐Reflection and Insight Scale (Grant et al., 2002) has been validated in a range of formats with different populations, it has not yet been validated with psychologists. Further, the psychometric properties of a short version of the scale (Silvia, 2021) have not been examined for use with psychologists. This study tested the factor structure, internal consistency and convergent and divergent validity of the Self‐Reflection and Insight Scale with registered psychologists ( N = 123), finding both the full scale and short version to have sound psychometrics. However, as there were low loading items across both versions of the measure, and the short version also excluded high‐loading items, the SRIS‐Revised (SRIS‐R) was formed through model improvement, retaining a total of 14 items. This revised version of the scale captures high loading items without redundancy of low‐loading items, resulting in a measure that parsimoniously captures the construct of self‐reflection as relevant to psychologists. The SRIS‐R demonstrated good internal consistency ( α = .882), convergent, divergent and construct validity. Scores on the SRIS‐R were used to test whether there was a correlation between self‐reflection and years of professional registration, with this not being significant.