Perseverance Counts but Consistency Does Not! Validating the Short Grit Scale in a Collectivist Setting

Is grit relevant to well‐being and strengths? Evidence across the globe for separating perseverance of effort and consistency of interests

“…Surprisingly, the total score reliability for Southeastern Asia was equivalent to the total sample value, with an observed subscale correlation of .19. A sample of participants from the Philippines, a country included in the present study's Southeastern Asia world region, generated a latent correlation of only .03 between the two grit facets (Datu et al, ). These results are in direct contrast to one another and may be due to sampling error from the smaller subsample size in the present study.…”

“…The original exploratory factor analysis on the Grit‐O (Duckworth et al, ) found a latent correlation of .45 between perseverance of effort and consistency of interests. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses on the Grit‐O and Grit‐S have found latent correlations that ranged from .03, .27, .39, to .59 (Abuhassàn & Bates, ; Datu, Valdez, and King, ; Duckworth & Quinn, ). The smaller correlations question whether the grit facets should be combined into overall grit scores.…”

Quantitative dogmatism in character assessment and its implications for education: A case study of grit

“…Consistent with the widely accepted view that “test validity depends upon the population” (Markus & Borsboom, , p. 255), researchers engage with a variety of samples in a variety of contexts in order “to establish grit as a domain‐general trait” (Eskreis‐Winkler, Duckworth, Shulman, & Beal, , p. 11). For instance, study populations include U.S. Army cadets (Maddi, Matthews, Kelly, Villareal, & White, ), Chicago public school seniors (Eskreis‐Winkler et al, ), law school graduates (Zimmerman & Brogan, ), undergraduates at an elite university (Duckworth et al, ), black male students at a predominantly white university (Strayhorn, ), Turkish students (Arslan, Akin, & Çîtemel, ), spelling bee contestants (Duckworth, Kirby, Tsukayama, Berstein, & Ericsson, ), working adults in Japan (Suzuki et al, ), Filipino adults (Datu, Valdez, & King, ), and a general population of adults recruited through internet surveys (Eskreis‐Winkler et al, ). However, the breadth of populations and contexts used to validate the grit scale creates an appearance of validity that is superficial because grit researchers consistently ignore the complex linguistic and contextual meaning‐making mechanisms of human interactions.…”

Predicting Educational Attainment: Does Grit Compensate for Low Levels of Cognitive Ability?

“…In contrast to studies that examined the grit-education relationship for small, select samples (Duckworth et al, 2007;Duckworth & Quinn 2009), our analysis used a representative sample of students with ability levels spanning the population-wide distribution. In addition, our analysis used a uniform sample of individuals as they advanced through successive educational levels, thus eliminating problems of noncomparability across studies that focus on a single educational institution (Bowman et al, 2015;Datu et al, 2016;Duckworth et al, 2007;Duckworth & Quinn, 2009;MacCann & Roberts, 2010: Strayhorn, 2014 or a single public school district (Eskreis-Winkler et al, 2014;West et al, 2016). Mendolia and Walker (2015) is a rare example of a prior study that examined the predictive power of grit with large-scale survey data.…”

“…Overall, it is unclear whether the timing of the NLSY97 TIPI administration imposed limits on our analysis. Third, although NLSY97 data enabled us to define a sequence of educational outcomes for a large, representative sample, the survey did not provide details on college engagement and satisfaction, time allocation, institutional support, and other aspects of educational experiences that previous studies (e.g., Bowman et al, 2015;Datu et al, 2016;EskreisWinkler et al, 2014) brought to bear.…”