Development and Validation of a Validity Scale for Use with the UPPS-P and Short UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scales

Two of the most widely used self-report measures of impulsivity are the UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale and its shortened version, the SUPPS-P, which currently are limited by their inability to detect careless and/or random responding. The present study develops and cross-validates an inconsistency scale for use with the UPPS-P and SUPPS-P in order to accurately screen for data quality and better detect invalid responding. A total of 443 participants were recruited from Amazon’s MTurk online data collection service to serve as the derivation sample and 231 undergraduates were recruited to serve as the cross-validation sample. The inconsistency scale demonstrated good classification accuracy in differentiating between genuine and random protocols and moderated the relationships between the UPPS-P/SUPPS-P and a criterion measure of impulsivity, the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11 (BIS-11). Thus, the inconsistency scale shows promise as an indicator of variable response inconsistency for use with both the UPPS-P and SUPPS-P in community and undergraduate research samples.