We were a bit reluctant to do this as it basically invalidates what little prior data there is for the Personal Values Questionnaire, but it made sense to us under the circumstances.
We’ve gone through two sets of reformatting and rewording the instrument. The first ‘re-draft’ was spurred by Ann Bailey, who rightfully noted that the wording of some of the Likert items was a bit complicated for those with a sub-college writing level and that the ordering of the Likert questions did not flow very well. This re-draft has been up on the ACBS site for a couple of years now.
The most recent changes occurred late last year. In the process of translating the instrument into German, Andrew Gloster and two of his doctoral students at Dresden Technical University noted that the prompts provided for the domain-specific values narratives differed across domains.
I had initially done this to provide a variety of ways of talking about values in the hope that subjects who had not been through ACT therapy might still ‘get’ what a value is. Andrew, I think rightfully, questioned this strategy as the different prompts might differentially cue different qualities of responses across domains, resulting in narratives (and subsequently, Likert ratings on those narratives) that might be functionally different.
So, in advance of that translation, we decided on a uniform values narrative prompt to be used across all domains. That served as the basis for the German translation, which I’ve also attached. I’m posting both of these on the ACBS site, but wanted to send them here as well as I know some others have used or plan to use the PVQ for research, etc (Martin Cernval from Uppsala University will be beginning a Swedish translation soon, for example).
I thought about further modifying the instrument (e.g., I really like Kelly Wilson’s addition of Parenting and Aesthetics values domains to the VLQ), but the instrument is beastly enough already. Functionally, it’s still the same instrument—except, hopefully, the aspects of the original instrument that functioned to confuse some subjects and potentially yield differentially ‘ACT-consistent’ (for lack of a better phrase) across domains have been eliminated!