Defense Mechanism Questionnaire
A 30-item self-report measure of characteristic defense styles, organized into four factors — Mature, Neurotic, Immature (Action), and Immature (Disavowal). Built entirely from public-domain IPIP items mapped onto the established four-factor defense framework.
At a glance
Detailed write-up pending
A full, citation-backed scientific write-up for this scale — overview, clinical use, and psychometrics in the voice of a dissertation "Measures" section — has not yet been authored. To honor the platform's no-fabricated-sources rule, this page currently shows only the verified registry facts above (item count, structure, scoring, and any published norms). No validity coefficients, reliability figures, or citations are shown here that cannot be traced to a named source; the authored write-up will be added once its sources have been read and recorded in the plan-integrity file.
Subscales
Mature 4 items
how much you cope through adaptive strategies such as humor and anticipation
Neurotic 2 items
how much you cope through intermediate strategies such as idealization
Immature: Action 8 items
how much you cope by acting out rather than reflecting
Immature: Disavowal 16 items
how much you cope by denying or deflecting difficulty
Example item
“Work hard.”
Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.
Scoring & interpretation
Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.
Source & citation
Items drawn from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, 1999; ipip.ori.org), organized by a four-factor defense-style framework (Mature, Neurotic, Immature-Action, Immature-Disavowal; cf. Andrews, Singh, & Bond, 1993).