Scoring, psychometrics, & score interpretation

Table of contents

Scoring

The scale responses are scored by averaging the responses of the benign envy and malicious envy subscales, respectively.

SPSS syntax:

* Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS)
* Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). Dispositional envy revisited: Unraveling the motivational dynamics of benign and malicious envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 284–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214564959

COMPUTE ben_envy = MEAN(benign1, benign2, benign3, benign4, benign5).
COMPUTE mal_envy = MEAN(malicious1, malicious2, malicious3, malicious4, malicious5).
EXECUTE.

If you named the variables according to their order, you will need to average the following items:

  • benign envy: 1, 3, 4, 7, 9
  • malicious envy: 2, 5, 6, 8, 10

SPSS syntax:

* Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS)
* Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). Dispositional envy revisited: Unraveling the motivational dynamics of benign and malicious envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 284–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214564959

COMPUTE ben_envy = MEAN(bemas1, bemas3, bemas4, bemas7, bemas9).
COMPUTE mal_envy = MEAN(bemas2, bemas5, bemas6, bemas8, bemas10).
EXECUTE.

Psychometric data

Internal consistency

In Lange and Crusius (2015, including Supplementary Data) we found internal consistency values within the following ranges:

  • Benign envy: Cronbach’s α = .79 - .90
  • Malicious envy: Cronbach’s α = .83 - .91

Temporal stability

Measuring the BeMaS twice with 3 to 4 weeks delay, we found the following temporal stability values (Lange & Crusius, 2015; reported in Supplementary Data):

  • Benign envy: r(174) = .67, p < .001
  • Malicious envy: r(174) = .66, p < .001

Measurement invariance

Lange and Crusius (2024, p. 6) summarize the evidence on scale invariance of the BeMaS and its translations as follows:

Several studies have investigated measurement invariance of the BeMaS across samples. In one study, the BeMaS showed configural and metric yet not scalar measurement invariance across US, German, Russian, and Polish samples, although less than 25% of the parameters showed scalar noninvariance (Kwiatkowska et al., 2022). Furthermore, in a sample in Japan, the BeMaS showed configural and metric, yet not scalar measurement invariance across student and nonstudent samples (Inoue & Yokota, 2022). In a sample in Sri Lanka, the BeMaS showed configural, yet not metric and scalar measurement invariance (especially for dispositional malicious envy) across gender (De Zoysa et al., 2021). In other studies, the BeMaS showed configural, metric, and scalar invariance across adults and adolescents in a Brazilian Portuguese sample (Peixoto et al., 2021b) and across gender and two age groups in a Vietnamese sample (Truong et al., 2022). Taken together, the evidence supports that the BeMaS and its translations are consistently characterized by at least configural invariance across groups, with invariance at least sometimes extending to the metric and scalar level.

Validity

Please refer to Lange and Crusius (2015) for information on the factorial structure, convergent and discriminant validity, and criterion validity gathered during scale validation. For a more comprehensive review of the research conducted with the BeMaS and its translations, including information on dimensionality, cross-cultural usage considerations, and the correlates of dispositional benign and malicious envy as assessed with the BeMaS, see Lange and Crusius (2024). Conceptual reviews on (dispositional) benign and malicious envy can be found in Lange et al. (2018) and Crusius et al. (2020).

Score interpretation

We are sometimes asked how the averaged subscale values can be interpreted.

  1. The averaged values for subscale items can be used to investigate differences on this subscale between participants. Thus, higher values for the benign envy subcscale items mean that participants agreed more to items reflecting higher dispositional benign envy than other participants. Respectively, higher values for the malicious envy items mean that participants score higher on dispositional malicious envy than other participants.
  2. Note that the mean values of the benign envy subscale and the malicious envy subscale cannot be directly compared to each other. Because of their content, people are less likely to agree to malicious envy items than to benign envy items. That is, the subscales differ in item difficulty. Thus, it would be incorrect to conclude that benign envy is more prevalent than malicious envy based on a higher mean value on the former subscale, for example.
  3. To our knowledge, the research using the BeMaS has been conducted with non-representative convenience samples. Normative data such as percentiles or cut-off values are currently not available.

References

Crusius, J., Gonzalez, M. F., Lange, J., & Cohen-Charash, Y. (2020). Envy: An adversarial review and comparison of two competing views. Emotion Review, 12(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073919873131

Lange, J., Blatz, L., & Crusius, J. (2018). Dispositional envy: A conceptual review. In V. Zeigler-Hill & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of personality and individual differences. Volume III: Applications of personality and individual differences (pp. 424–439). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526451248

Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2015). Dispositional envy revisited: Unraveling the motivational dynamics of benign and malicious envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 284–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214564959

Lange, J., & Crusius, J. (2024). Dispositional Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS). In C. U. Krägeloh, M. Alyami, & O. N. Medvedev (Eds.), International handbook of behavioral health assessment. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89738-3_66-1