Edwards Personal Preference Schedule

The Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) (publisher: The Psychological Corporation) is a scale designed to measure 15 personal needs, originally proposed by H. A. Murray. The scale, authored by Allen Edwards, was constructed to provide ipsative information on how people rank one need relative to their other needs, as well as normative information on their needs compared with other people's. Edwards discussed needs as nonclinical personality variables and considers the EPPS foremost a personality measure. The EPPS has been used in vocational counseling to encourage discussion about how individuals want to relate to coworkers and their desired levels of responsibility on the job.

The EPPS includes 15 personality scales and two scales for assessing the validity of an individual's results. The personality dimensions include needs for Achievement (succeeding and fulfilling high standards), Deference (concern for the opinions of or approval from others), Order (organization and fastidiousness), Exhibition (social attention), Autonomy (freedom to self-determine), Affiliation (attachment to friends), Intraception (psychological-mindedness and introspection), Succorance (sympathy and affection from others), Dominance (leading and decision making), Abasement (feeling guilt for wrongdoings), Nurturance (helping others), Change (variety and novelty of activity), Endurance (task focus and forbearance), Heterosexuality (engaging the opposite sex romantically or sexually), and Aggression (being derisive, critical, and vengeful toward others).

The items on the EPPS pair two statements, each reflecting 1 of the 15 dimensions, and require test takers to identify which is more typical of themselves. Statements reflecting each of the personality variables are paired two times with statements reflecting each of the others. Overall, the test requires approximately 45 minutes to administer. Raw scores from the test can be used to identify the relative importance of a need to an individual, whereas normative data, collected in the late 1950s from a college sample and a survey of U.S. households, supplies information on how test takers' personal needs compare with others'.

The test and its norms were most recently updated in 1959; consequently, the instrument has been criticized for having normative data that are too old to serve as a meaningful index. However, the EPPS has been praised for the degree to which its item structure reduces the influence of social desirability, and overall evidence suggests that the individual scales show moderate-to-favorable internal consistency and satisfactory stability over a week. In addition, the evidence of convergent validity for the scale scores, most of which was collected in the 1950s, shows that [Page 300]the EPPS scale scores relate modestly, though as predicted, to other personality measures. For example, measures of agreeableness showed small positive correlations with deference and nurturance scales and small-to-medium negative correlations with aggression and dominance scales.