Development and validation of the Kernis-Goldman authenticity inventory-short form (KGAI-SF)

Psychological authenticity has long been of interest to social thinkers, and empirical research on this topic has steadily increased since the 1970s. The present work contributes to this body of knowledge by describing the development of a short form for the Kernis-Goldman Authenticity Inventory (KGAI), a widely used self-report instrument. Thirteen of the 45 items from the original KGAI were removed on the basis of semantic ambiguity or redundancy, and the remaining 32-items were subjected to cross-validated ordinal confirmatory factor analysis (N = 1252) in an effort to identify psychometrically redundant or unreliable items. The resulting 20-item short-form (KGAI-SF) exhibited good reliability across the ranges of the four underlying dimensions of authenticity (awareness, unbiased processing, behavior, relational orientation), as well as good discriminant and convergent validity.