MEASURING SELF-ACTUALIZATION

A few days ago Irena O’Brien sent out a post about Scott Barry Kaufman and his idea of how to test for self-actualization. I see this kind of thing a lot— and each time I do, I wonder if the person has done any homework. The post talked about Kaufman taking 10 of Maslow’s 17 characteristics and attempting to correlate them to the five personality traits and creating some kind of measurement. And it is presented as if this is new. It is not. So I’m doubting that he did his homework.

Let’s get into a time-machine and go back to 1962. That’s when Everett Shostrom created an instrument to measure self-actualization— the Personal Orientation Inventory or POI. The POI was conceptualized and the initial scale constructs delineated by Shostrom (1964) during summer of 1962 with the consultation of Abraham Maslow. It is made up of 150 two-choice comparative- value-judgment items reflect significant value judgments as seen by therapists in practice and are based on the theoretical formulations of several writers in humanistic psychology including Maslow, Riesman, Rogers, and Perls.