Introduction

Anchoring vignettes are used in order to attempt the improvement of validity in scales with rating responses. In the lasts years this method has been used in several fields and with different kinds of samples. It consists in rate other people or situations in the same categorical scale that the respondent will answer for one’s own situation. Then, the respondent answers for his own situations will be rescaled based on the answers for the vignettes on that dimension. One of the instruments that uses anchoring vignettes is SENNA, a self-report measure of personality traits with emphasis in the socioemotional skills.

Objective

The aim of this study was to explore SENNA’s anchoring vignettes in a Brazilian adults sample.

Design

The sample was composed by 2002 Brazilian citizens, completed a 53 items version of SENNA. T-student and one-way ANOVA tests were made to compare anchoring vignettes between genders, race, employment condition, age and region.

Results

In our sample 51.7% were women, the mean age was 36.84 (SD=14.19), 4.8% were illiterate, 28.1% completed the 12^th grade, 63.3% were employed, 9.9% unemployed and 11.4% housewives. There weren’t differences between genders (p>0.05), when comparing the mean scores of the positive vignettes plus the inversed ones. For employment condition, only the retired ones had differences with all other groups (p>0.05), except with those who were looking for the first job. For race differences were obtained in 4 of the 12 vignettes (p>0.05). For group ages differences, were found in 2 of the vignettes (p>0.05). For region, 9 of total vignettes presented differences (p>0.05).

Conclusion

The anchoring vignettes didn’t present differences between gender, and employment condition, except for retired people. For race, and age, differences were small, for region the differences were substantive, pointing the importance of this reference group for vignettes in this instrument.