A psychometric analysis of the three gunas.

The Vedic Personality Inventory was devised to assess the validity of the Vedic concept of the three gunas or modes of nature as a psychological categorization system. The sample of 619 subjects included persons of varying ages and occupations from a middle-size city in southeastern United States, and also of subscribers to a magazine focusing on Eastern-style spirituality. The original 90-item inventory was shortened to 56 items on the basis of reliability and validity analyses. Cronbach alpha for the three subscales ranged from .93 to .94, and the corrected item-total correlation of every item score with its subscale score was greater than .50. Three measures of convergent validity and four measures of discriminant validity provide evidence for construct validity. The loading of every item on the scale is stronger for the intended subscale than for any other subscale. Although each subscale contains congeneric items, the factors are not independent. The nonorthogonality is consistent with Vedic theory. This inventory requires psychometric development and testing cross-culturally as well as to be experimentally implemented in group research and individual assessment.