The development and validation of the arts self-perception inventory for adults

The purpose of this investigation was to develop and validate an adult form of the Arts Self-Perception Inventory (ASPI), a multidimensional self-concept inventory designed to measure perceptions of skill in music, visual art, dance, and dramatic art. Data from two independent samples of college students (ns = 175 and 258) strongly supported the construct validity of the ASPI (adult form) by showing that its subscale reliabilities were uniformly high (alpha greater than or equal to .95), that its hypothesized internal structure was clearly defined in both conventional and confirmatory factor analyses, that its factor structure was highly consistent across validation and cross-validation samples, and that its subscale scores formed logically consistent patterns of relationships with a wide variety of external criterion measures. Possible uses of the instrument are discussed.