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psychometric support for his construct and measure of materialism. It consists of 24 items 
summed from subscales of Possessiveness (9 items), Nongenerosity (7 items), and Envy (8 
items). Items are rated on a five-point Likert scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly 
agree). As shown on the questionnaire form in Appendix B, some items in each scale are 
reverse-keyed and the subscale items were alternatingly inter-mixed. . 
The fourth section of the questionnaire consisted of 10 scales from Jackson's (1967/1984) 
Personality Research Form (PRF), Form E. The PRF is based on Murray’s (1938) dimensions of 
personality and has been widely used with Canadian and U.S. populations (Jackson, 1967/1984). 
Nine personality measures (Abasement, Affiliation, Autonomy, Change, Defendence, 
Dominance, Nurturance, Order, and Social Recognition) were selected to correspond to the 
plausible motivational explanations of private property discussed earlier. The tenth scale was 
a measure of Desirability-responding. To reduce the demands on the respondents, 11 other PRF 
personality scales were omitted. The Infrequency (lie) scale was also omitted because 
participation was voluntary. Descriptions of high scorers and defining trait adjectives for the 
personality scales used here appear in Appendix C. Each scale consists of 16 true-false items 
reflecting the underlying construct. Half are reverse-keyed. Items from the PRF scales are 
alternatingly intermixed. Copyright prohibits inclusion of scale items here. 
The questionnaire was completed by two samples of adult English-speaking Canadians 
selected for availability and for heterogeneity relative to typical university research surveys. 
The first sample consisted of 195 Queen's University summer session students (81 men, 114 
women, mean age 31.8 years), 56% of whom were public school teachers. The second 
consisted of 92 people in cars with Canadian license plates waiting in the Wolfe Island, Ontario, 
ferryboat queue (46 men, 46 women, mean age 40.1 years). These were resident farm families, 
summer cottagers, or people in transit. The questionnaire was distributed, completed and 
collected at the time of recruitment. 
It should be noted that 36 students and 30 ferry passengers omitted responses to one or 
more items. Subjects with omissions were included in the analyses if no more than two items 
were omitted from any of the PRF scales. Two omissions, scored as “False”, were allowed 
beoause the PRF scales each have many items, exactly half of which are reverse-keyed. Thus, 
unintentional and random errors would tend to be distributed equally for and against the scale, 
and intentional omissions would be scored as not consenting to the item. Because the verb