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effect of the general I-E locus of control conviction on remembering and planning one's life: Individual differences in life event reports of Georgian respondents, The
Social Behavior and Personality, 2000 by Hentschel, Uwe, Sumbadze, Nana, Shubladze, Sophia
81 subjects from Tbilisi (Republic of Georgia; 37 men, 44 women) with an age range from 27 to 35 years were asked to report past and future life events. Taking into account I-E control convictions, the basic hypothesis was that internals and externals would differ in a number of life event variables. Tests were performed in regard to the number of events reported, the time span covered by the reports, and evaluation of the life events. These tests supported the basic hypothesis to a great extent. An explorative data analysis technique was applied to describe individual differences in the usage of different event categories. Most of the results could be interpreted within the existing theoretical frame of reference for I-E control convictions. Results of the explorative part of the study are useful for further hypothesis generation and crossvalidation attempts.
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There is probably not much controversy surrounding the statement that persons normally attribute reasons for many outcomes of their actual or planned behaviors, or even for the behaviors themselves. This could simply be rooted in the basic patterns of cognitive functioning, or it could be as Kelly (1955) saw it, the controlling feature of our minds. The debate is more about the possible origins of these attributions and what consequences they may have, i.e. their theoretical power of psychological explanation.
Among the different constructs of control convictions the assumption of a general internal-external (I-E) locus of control dimension seems to be one of the most popular (cf. Rotter, 1990), because of its theory-related operationalization in the form of a 29 item inventory (Rotter, 1966). This scale attempts to measure the general difference between people's attributions of behavior outcome as influenced by the self (I) or by the external environment (E). Strickland (1989), in his overview on internal-external control expectancies, listed a number of constructs- among them Seligman's (1975) learned helplessness, Carver and Scheier's (1981) self regulation, Kiehlstrom and Cantor's (1984) self schemas and Bandura's (1977) self efficacy, which show at least some similarity to the I-E construct and - in principle - could be of interest in the present context, too. Interestingly enough, he made a link also to mindfulness (Langer, 1983) and creative thought.
From a psychometric point of view Rotter's ( 1966) approach of measuring I-E control convictions, as well as other I-E scale variants, has been criticized for test construction problems, mainly with regard to the question of dimensionality, i.e. the generality vs. specificity of the control convictions (Kline, 1993). If control convictions should vary with specific domains, then, as among others Lefcourt (1976) argues, I-E preferably should also be measured domain-specifically which, of course, would not make the measurement task easier.
The present authors see the point in the specificity argument, but given the aim of the present study, they nevertheless preferred to rely on the general I-E construct.
For registering the view of one's own life, they have used the so-called Life Line, an open technique with the possibility of reporting past and future life events subjectively seen as important (a more detailed description of the Life Line is given in the Method section).
The aim of the study concerns mainly the hypothesis that men and women dif fering in their I-E conviction may construe their lives in different ways. The topic is related to what in the literature is now also called life planning or, more specifically, career planning (cf. Kilburg, 1991; Savickas, 1995; Skovholt, Morgan & Negron-Cunningham, 1989), although some of the strategies followed in that approach are explicitly more goal-directed.
METHODS
SAMPLE
The sample comprised 81 Georgian subjects, inhabitants of Tbilisi (37 men, 44 women) with an age range from 27 to 35 years) (M = 31) almost all with an academic background (76 with a university degree, three students, two with other highly technical education), who all took part in the study voluntarily.
INSTRUMENTS
I-E scale
Respondents were administered the general I-E locus of control scale (Rotter, 1966) with 29 items, of which six are fillers (not related to the I-E construct), in a Georgian translation. This translation dates back to the time when the country still belonged to the Soviet regime. In order to avoid trivial acquiescence with actual facts some items were slightly changed. In item 12 `citizen' and `government' were changed to `employee' and `head of an organization' respectively. In item 22 `political corruption' was changed to `protectionism' , The word `leaders' was used instead of `politicians' in items 22b, and 29a, and instead of `bad government' in item 29b. The translation was cross-checked for meaning, and compared with a Russian translation. Due to both the intended changes in some items with the main aim of conserving the meaning instead of achieving a literal translation, and the unavailability of larger bi-lingual samples, the method of back-translation, often recommended as one of the possible safeguards in adapting verbal material for cross-cultural research (cf. Brislin, Lonner & Thorndike, 1973) was not applied.
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