A Preliminary Study of a Korean Inventory for Defense Mechanism

The author investigated to select final items of a Korean Defense Inventory for standardization during the period from Feburary 19 to March 10, 1990 at Seoul.

The number of subjects were 528 who were sampled by the proportional stratified sampling method. The final items of Korean Defense Inventory were selected by the satistics for item difficulty, item standard deviation, corrected item-total correlation, Guttman split-half reliability coefficients.

The results were as follows :

1) Among the prliminary items 262, 200 items were finally selected for standard test which were composed of 10 items by 20 ego defense mechanism scales.

2) The range of each scales mean was from 2.64 to 3.34 and the individual items deviated from .69 to 1.25.

3) The corrected item-total correlation coefficients were adequate for all items except 13 of them and the Guttman split-half reliability coefficients were satisfactory for all scales.

4) Factor analysis extracted four factors of which result was consistant with other research results. Factor 1 was "maladaptive defense mechanism" which were composed of projection, displacement, dissociation, action-out, regression, passive-aggressive behavior, somatization, identification, brag. Factor 2 was "mature defense mechanism", controlling altruism, distortion, anticipication, rationalization, sublimation, humor. Factor 3 was "excessive inhibited defense mechaism" which were suppression and reaction-formation. Factor 4 was "reality-evasive defense mechaism" which were denial and evasion.