Cross-cultural adaptation of the Clinical Perfectionism Questionnaire (CPQ) for Brazilians

Abstract

The goals of this paper are the cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric properties evaluation of the Brazilian version of the Clinical Perfectionism Questionnaire (CPQ), a scale that measures the tendency of a person to pursue self-demanding standards and the subjective consequences provided by achieving them or not. The original instrument was translated to Portuguese and back-translated to English. The preliminary version was judged by one of the authors of the instrument and by Brazilian specialists, producing content validity indicators. The final version was applied to a sample of 250 Brazilian undergraduate students, aged from 18 to 60 years old (M=24.9, SD=8.63), mostly female (76%). In the Exploratory Factor Analysis, data have revealed a bidimensional structure, and the other psychometric properties, such as internal consistency and validity regarding other variables, have shown adequate to the instrument. Additional analyses of unidimensional congruence reinforced the multidimensionality of the measure.

Psychometric properties of the Brazilian version of Clinical Perfectionism Questionnaire after rewording negatively keyed items

“…Most studies found two dimensions, as well as from other instruments that measure perfectionism. According to the results of these studies, PS and PC measured by the CPQ are two different factors, however related to one another -correlations between 0.23 and 0.48 (Dickie et al, 2012;Egan et al, 2016;Rocha et al, 2022Stoeber & Damian, 2014. In another direction, two recent studies found that the bifactor model has indicated good fit to data based on CFA, which suggests the coexistence of specific and global factors (Howell et al, 2020;Prior et al, 2018).…”

“…Negatively keyed items are those whose endorsement indicates a low level of the psychological variable being measured and, therefore, it must be reversed in the scoring process (Furr, 2011). In validation studies, the two negatively keyed items of CPQ demonstrated little impact on the global score through Corrected Item-Total Correlation (CITC), that is, the correlation of the individual item with the scale total omitting that item (Dickie et al, 2012;Howell et al, 2020;Moloodi et al, 2017;Rocha et al, 2022;Shu et al, 2019;Stoeber & Damian, 2014). It suggests that the negatively keyed items do not contribute significantly to the CPQ global score.…”

“…Regarding latent structure, most studies with different samples found the presence of two factors, similar to PS and PC dimensions (Dickie et al, 2012;Egan et al, 2016;Moloodi et al, 2017;Rocha et al, 2022;Stoeber & Damian, 2014). It is, one factor comprises the items related to demanding standards, while the other embraces the items regarding failure and its consequences.…”

“…In the only study with a Brazilian sample (Rocha et al, 2022), EFA with promax rotation also indicated a two-factor solution, but item 8 was problematic regarding the factor analysis, because it did not present substantial factor loading in any of the two factors, being excluded in the subsequent analyzes. In addition, the unidimensionality of data was tested, and the results recommended that the instrument should not be treated as a predominantly unidimensional measure.…”

“…Some studies have also investigated the validity of the CPQ regarding other variables, while comparing its scores with other instruments that measure maladjustment indicators, such as negative affects (Egan et al, 2016), depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms (Moloodi et al, 2017;Rocha et al, 2022;Shu et al, 2019) and eating disorders symptoms (Shu et al, 2019). In general, the PC dimension has shown a bigger relation with these indicators when compared to the PS dimension, as it occurred with other instruments that measure perfectionism (Limburg et al, 2016).…”