Feelings and behaviours (MIS) questionnaire

Contents

Background and introduction

This is a one page, 22 item questionnaire which I designed in the light of a literature review resulting in a paper done in the days before “systematic reviews”:
      Lacey & Evans (1986) The Impulsivist: a multi-impulsive personality disorder British Journal of Addiction 81:641-649.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.1986.tb00382.x.

Some work with an earlier version of the questionnaire is reported in:
      Evans & Lacey (1992) Multiple self-damaging behaviour among alcoholic women. A prevalence study. British Journal of Psychiatry, 161, 643-647.
https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.161.5.643.

The measure was published formally in:
      Evans, Searle & Dolan (1998) Two new tools for the assessment of multi-impulsivity: the MIS and the CAM. European Eating Disorders Review, 6, 48-57.
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0968(199803)6:1<48::AID-ERV230>3.0.CO;2-9.

The review and thinking for the first paper made me aware of the enormous differences between the psychiatric idea of impulse control problems, with its links with psychodynamic thinking and its roots in idiographic phenomenology, and the concepts of impulsivity/impulsivenees/ risk-taking/sensation-seeking in the psychological literature. This questionnaire was an attempt to tap into the psychiatric ideas in the form of a self-report questionnaire that would also be usable to tap Prof. Lacey’s ideas about the “multi-impulsive personality”.

I and others have used the questionnaire in a variety of forms and this form owes much to Dr. Bridget Dolan who, after discussion with me, modified and extended the areas of impulsivity covered for her use of it in Henderson Hospital, prison and probation studies.

One thing should be said immediately: it is not intended that the scale responses should be summed or expected to show the a unidimensional scaling pattern of responses in any conceivable samples. Prof. Lacey’s ideas, like the ideas about borderline personality functioning suggest that there will be some negative intercorrelation between item responses in impulsive samples as individuals find different areas of impulsivity “interchangeable”. Prof. Lacey’s specific expectation was that there would be essentially non-impulsive people, people with one area of impulsivity, and people, his “multi-impulsives” or “impulsivists” who would show more than one area of impulsivity and some capacity to shift impulse control problems from one area to another, say as one became the focus of treatment.

The questionnaire is copyright but I am happy for anyone to use it and it is released here under a Creative Commons Atribution-NoDerivatives license. I would prefer if you didn’t make a profit out of redistributing it as my belief has always been that mental health measures should be a not for profit realm, however, in the interests of more open access the license doesn’t proscribe profiting from republishing it (but I can’t see that there’s much to be made from that as it will always be available for free!). The conditions of the licence are:

  1. My copyright and this URL (i.e. “https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/root/tools/mis/”) are clearly marked on it.
  2. You can change the physical nature of the questionnaire and cosmetics/aesthetics (and will probably want to do that as the versions below aren’t beautiful). However, you mustn’t change the content in any way, which includes translating it … but …
  3. … I see, courtesy of Daisy Harvey and her PhD that it can be useful, therapeutically or for research, to adapt and build on the MIS so I no longer rule adaptations out but …
  4. …I do request that you inform me that you are using it and confirm my permission for you to change it if you are doing that. (I’m always interested to hear if people are using it and what they’re doing with it.)

Translation

I am keen that people explore translating it and its cross-cultural applicability (it seems clear to me that patterns of response are likely to be very different in different cultures and even in different subcultures of the white, “first world” populations for which it was developed). I have over twenty years of experience of such work now from the CORE system and the BSQ and can probably provide useful advice but I no longer have time for major collaborations around the MIS.

Downloading

Versions mounted here:

Page created 6.i.19 from material on old PSYCTC.org site first mounted 5.viii.96! Latest update 14.v.24. Page author CE, licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) .