Validation of the Type A Interview Assessment of Adolescents: A Multidimensional Approach

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Abstract
The Adolescent Structural Interview (ASI), adapted from the interview that assesses Type A behavior of adults, was administered to 204 adolescents. These adolescents also completed a battery of self-report questionnaires that measured the 3 major components of Pattern A: competitive achievement-striving, speed and impatience and aggressiveness-hostility. Items were constructed to measure efforts to control which were hypothesized to underlie the major manifestations of Type A behaviors. The ASI content and speech ratings were subjected to factor analytic procedures, and the relationships between the major factors, interview behaviors, impatience and harddriving, and the appropriate test scores were examined. Dichotomization of the 3 factor score distributions and subsequent t-tests indicated that the factor scores have discriminative ability and are related as expected to the appropriate self-report measures of Type A behaviors. Of the 3 factors identified, the interview behaviors factor was most highly correlated with interview classification, while the 2 content factors yielded much weaker associations. The component scores of the ASI provide unique information, in terms of relationships with relevant dependent measures, that is not provided by the interview classification alone.