Social desirability, defense styles, and the Children's Role Inventory scale.

This investigation was designed to answer several research questions. First, using each participant's dominant score to place that individual into one of the four Children's Role Inventory categories, what would be the distribution of college students across the categories? Second, is there a relationship between scores on scales of the Children's Role Inventory and (a) on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and (b) on scales of the Defense Style Questionnaire? 236 undergraduate students at a southern university completed the above questionnaires. The distribution of participants over Children's Role Inventory categories was Hero 179, Mascot 41, Scapegoat 1, Lost Child 9, and Not Classified 6. After Bonferroni correction, significant positive but small correlations were reported between the Hero Scale of the Children's Role Inventory and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, as well as between the Hero Scale of the Children's Role Inventory and the Adaptive Scale of the Defense Style Questionnaire.