Balanced inventory of desirable responding: Factor structure, reliability, and validity with an offender sample

The psychometric properties of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) were examined with 539 incarcerated male offenders. Confirmatory factor analysis of the BIDR resulted in a three factor solution of Impression Management, Denial of the Negative, and Over Confident Rigidity with scale score coefficient alphas of 0.84, 0.73, and 0.58, respectively. External validity was demonstrated by comparing scale differences (a) between offenders admitting their offences with nonadmitting offenders, (b) intake vs release offenders, and (c) with a theoretically relevant item from Hareʹs Psychopathy Checklist. To further examine the convergent and discriminant validity, the BIDR scales were compared with other response style measures of Denial, Social Desirability, Person Reliability, number of true keyed responses, and number of false keyed responses derived from the Basic Personality Inventory. Also included was the Satiation Scale, a measure of test taking attitudes. The overall results suggest that the BIDR has utility in the measurement of socially desirable responding with offenders. The implications of these results for interpreting offendersʹ self-report assessments are discussed.