Extreme response style (ERS) is the tendency of questionnaire respondents to use more or less frequently extreme intervals on rating scales, independent of specific item content. Although ERS has been considered to be an important response tendency, there have been few attempts to construct a scale of ERS. In particular, no ERS scale is available in Japan. In this study, two scales of ERS were constructed, based on almost the same procedure used by Berg (1953). Those scales are called the Japanese version Word Reaction Test (WRT) and Perceptual Reaction Test (PRT). Test-retest correlations and inter-scale correlations of the two ERS measures were assessed. Results suggest that both WRT and PRT have high test-retest reliability, and they showed high convergent validity. Since the two ERS measures correlated highly, they could be used interchangeably.
Key words: extreme response style, Word Reaction Test, Perceptual Reaction Test, test-retest reliability, convergent validity