An Examination of the Construct Validity of the Rorschach Mutuality of Autonomy (MOA) Scale

Using 100 clinical cases, we examined the construct validity of the Mutuality of Autonomy (MOA) Scale (Urist, 1977) using Westen and Rosenthal's (2003) rcontrast - construct validity (CV) procedure for quantifying a pattern of convergent-discriminant relationships between a target measure and a set of criterion variables. Our 15 criterion variables included the Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 2003) variables, a CS-based measure of ego strength (Resnick, 1994), and 3 subscales from the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (Westen, Lohr, Silk, Kerber, Goodrich, 1990). We generated the rcontrast - CV coefficients to test 2 competing hypotheses: that the MOA Scale primarily measures object relations (OR) quality or that it primarily measures psychopathology. Results suggest that the MOA Scale is an equally potent measure of OR and psychopathology regardless of the MOA Scale index used.