Overview
The Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS) is a self-report instrument that identifies individuals who, when responding to assessments and rating scales, distort their responses. Designed to be administered concurrently with other instruments, the PDS has been used to successfully identify individuals who might have distorted their responses when completing other clinical and/or personality diagnostic instruments.
Suitable for
16 and older
Product Description
Key Features:
- Assesses socially desirable responding both as a response set and a response style
- Contains 40 items that use contemporary, gender-neutral language
- Backed by extensive empirical confirmation of reliability and validity, and is appropriate for both clinical and nonclinical samples
- May also be used in educational and human resource settings and can provide an index for comparing the power of different administration conditions to elicit desirable responding
- Useful in instrument development and evaluation
- Online scoring provides instantly generated reports with statistical, textual, and graphical interpretations of a respondent's results
Qualification level required:
Level 2. Please see our Test User Qualifications page for guidance
Reliability
Coefficient alphaá for internal reliability for the PDS subscales and the total PDS score were satisfactory for all four samples. The coefficients for the SDE scales ranged from .70-.75 and IM and PDS total coefficients ranged from .81-.86.
Norms
The PDS was standardized using a large adult sample (n = 441) from the general population, as well as samples from college student, military, and prison populations collected by the author and other researchers using the PDS. Information on the sample demographics and the sampling techniques used are not provided in the test manual and issues of sex or age differences in socially desirable responding are not addressed.
Duration
5 to 7 minutes
Release Note
1998
