SACRAL: Toward the Meaning and Measurement of Friendliness

Friendliness was regarded as a construct or dispositional tendency consisting of four components: Self-concept (S), the person's beliefs about self related to peer relationships; Accessibility (AC), giving behaviors involving attention and respect; Rewardingness (R), the giving of more tangible rewards, such as money and compliments; and Alienation (AL), personal beliefs about acceptance and the world as a friendly place. A 40-item questionnaire was developed to assess these components of friendliness. Studies of the questionnaire with college students and children supported its internal consistency, test-retest reliability, concurrent validity, construct validity, and discriminant validity. Although virtually all respondents reported themselves as friendly, high SACRAL scorers, when compared with low scorers, less frequently experience loneliness and in a variety of contexts claim to be more apt to engage in friendly behaviors. The impression that emerges of relatively low scorers on SACRAL is of people whose professed actions are somewhat inconsistent with their personal beliefs.