Humility has long been a topic of interest and inquiry for philosophers and theologians, resulting in a deep and rich literature on the virtue.
Around the turn of the century, the topic began to attract the attention of psychological scientists, owing in part to the emergence of positive psychology with its emphasis on positive human functioning.
Since the publication ofTangney's (2000) influential review, in which she described humility as “a neglected virtue in the social and psychological sciences,” (p. 70) interest in the topic from psychological scientists has grown steadily.A search of articles published in journals indexed by PsycINFO found only four articles including the term humility in 2001. In contrast, 123 articles including the term were published in 2018, continuing a trend of more than 100 such articles published per year, starting in 2014.A key concern for psychological scientists, who rely primarily on empirical methods of inquiry, is how to operationally define abstract concepts such as humility. One approach to operationally defining such concepts is the development and use of measurement instruments and strategies that capture individual differences in their expression. Noting the necessity of measurement for empirical research on humility,Tangney (2000) observed that, “Work in this area would be greatly enhanced by the development of theoretically informed measures of humility” (p. 70) and that,“psychologists' expertise in the area of measurement would be especially welcome” (p. 71). Psychological scientists have answered Tangney's call, resulting in the development of numerous empirical methods for measuring humility. In fact, the number of humility measures and measurement strategies has expanded to the point that the need has arisen to review, summarize, and synthesize the available options. Several such reviews have recently appeared in print (e.g., Card, 2018; Hill et al., 2017; McElroy-Heltzel et al., 2019; Nielsen and Marrone, 2018;Worthington and Allison, 2018).
Drawing on two decades of empirical research on humility, our goal in this chapter is to extend recent reviews of psychological measures of the concept by offering a framework for choosing among extant measures and developing new measures of humility. The framework takes into account the motivating research question and chosen research strategy. Although our focus is psychological measurement, conceptualizations of the concept and, in some cases, the measures themselves have been informed by philosophical and theological inquiry on humility. Thus, our framework is relevant for philosophers and theologians interested in integrating findings from empirical research by psychological scientists into their conceptual models or developing their own empirical studies of humility. We refer to specific extant measures as examples of different measurement approaches, but do not recommend one over another apart from emphasizing the importance of fit between measure, research question, and research strategy. Rather, we suggest that, at this early point in the history of empirical research on humility, and given the specific challenges involved in measuring the concept, the availability and routine use of multiple measures is warranted.
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