[Reliability and Validity Indicators of Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire in the Context of Culture and Gender]

Abstract

Purpose: The Berkeley Expressivity Questionaire (BEQ) was a scale, developed by Gross and John (1995) to measure emotion expression. The purpose of the present study was to investigate reliability and validity indicators of the BEQ in our culture.

Method: The sample composed of 213 (115 women) people whose average of age 35. The people were voluntered for the study and lived within the borders of Izmir. The validity indicators of the questionaire were investigated through explanatory and confirmatory factor analyses, gender differences between the scores and correlational analyses on Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). Anyway, the realibility indicators of the questionaire were explored by internal consistency coefficient and test re-test reliability.

Results: Confirmatory and explanatory factor analyses revealed a three factor model explaining % 48 of the total variance. These factors were named as emotional expressivity, impulse strength and masking. The results showed a positive correlation between the DERS and the total BEQ scores, which were congruent with theoretical expectations. It was found that the women had higher scores in the BEQ, emotional expressivity and impulse strength subscales while the men had higher scores than women in the masking subscale, meaning the women might be more emotionally expressive and the intensity of their emotional experience were higher than men. In addition, the Cronbach's alpha value was .81 and test re-test values were .78 for the total BEQ.

Conclusion: Based on these results it was concluded that The Turkish version of the BEQ has sufficiently high reliability and validity to justify its use as a tool in emotion expression studies.