Assessing the Development of Inflated Responsibility Beliefs: The Pathways to Inflated Responsibility Beliefs Scale

Inflated responsibility beliefs are hypothesized to be a central feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; Rachman, 1998, 2002; Salkovskis, 1985), but the etiology of these beliefs remains untested. Salkovskis and colleagues (1999) proposed 5 primary pathways to the development of inflated responsibility beliefs (e.g., heightened responsibility as a child, exposure to rigid and extreme codes of conduct as a child). The current paper presents 2 studies developing a self-report measure—the Pathways to Inflated Responsibility Beliefs Scale (PIRBS)—of these hypothesized pathways. In the first study, an initial version of the scale is developed and the number of items are reduced. In the second study, the revised scale is shown to provide a reasonable match to the proposed structure and to have good internal consistency, retest reliability, and convergent and divergent validity. These initial data suggest that the PIRBS may be useful for studying the etiology of inflated responsibility beliefs that are hypothesized to be central to the development of OCD. Limitations and future directions are discussed.