Development of an instrument to measure reticence

Currently there is no standardized, quantitative measure of the reticence construct created by Phillips (1965, 1984, 1986). Critics (e.g., Glaser, 1981) have argued that this has made it difficult to compare findings across studies of reticence as well as to establish the effectiveness of skills training programs such as the rhetoritherapy program Phillips developed for the treatment of reticence. In response to the need for a measure of reticence, Kelly, Keaten, and Begnal (1992) developed the Reticence Scale. The six dimensions of the Reticence Scale were designed to correspond to the categories of skill deficiencies detailed by Phillips in his latest work on reticence (1991). The scale is a generalized-context (McCroskey, 1984) measure which assesses reticence in social situations. The purpose of this research is to assess the validity of the Reticence Scale. Participants, drawn from the Penn State University Reticence Program, completed the Reticence Scale, the PRCA-24, the Willingness to Communicate Scale (McCroskey & Richmond, 1987), and/or the Conversational Skills Rating Scale (Spitzberg & Hurt, 1987). In addition, some of them wrote responses to six open-ended questions (tapping the six dimensions of the scale) asking them to assess their communication skills in social situations. Independent raters coded the responses using three levels: no problems, moderate problems, high problems. Results overall supported the construct validity of the scale. There were moderate, positive correlations between the Reticence Scale and the PRCA-24 and its dimensions except for the public dimension of the PRCA, which obtained a low correlation. In addition, the relationships between the Reticence Scale and both the Conversational Skills Rating Scale and the Willingness to Communicate Scale were moderate and in the negative direction as hypothesized The concurrent validity of the Reticence Scale was supported by the high correlations between its dimensions and the open-ended responses.