The sele sentence completion questionnaire: a new instrument for the assessment of personal meaning in research on aging

Abstract

In this paper, the SELE-instrumenits presented. The SELE-instrument is a sentence completion test and an accompanying coding scheme, which is designed to study cognitions about self and life. The related theoretical construct is the personal meaning system, which encompasses different meaning domains, like "self", "activities" and "social relations", as well as evaluations and time perspectives. It is argued that especially in aging research. it is necessarv to use more oven instruments in studying self-and-life-cognitions. A short history of sentence completion instruments in psychology, is presented in order to better understand the specific contents of the SELE-instrument. The SELE provides sentence stems in the first form singular ("I") combination with verbal factors, which express different combinations of evaluation and time perspective, to which the respondents have to react in their own words. The SELE-instrumenits thus a semi-structured questionnaire, which can be used in large-scale research. The sentence completions are coded with an extensive coding scheme, which is hierarchially and dimensionally organized. Some figures on the coding reliability as well as on the validity and stability of the instrument are presented. The different uses to which the SELE-instrument as been put are described shortly.