The Construct of Self-Expansiveness and the Validity of the Transpersonal Scale of the Self-Expansiveness Level Form

The self-concept is usually seen as individualistic and/or social-relational, although sometimes it is viewed as ecological, temporal, or biological, constituting differing perspectives that are not well unified. The construct of self-expansiveness, which shows how the self-concept can expand from a narrow individualistic identification to wider social, ecological, temporal, and biological identifications to very expansive transpersonal identifications, is discussed as an integrating framework for understanding the self-concept. Three validation studies using the Self-Expansiveness Level Form Transpersonal Scale (Friedman, 1981), a measure of transpersonal self-expansiveness, were conducted with a known transpersonal/spiritual sample and student samples, comparing it with various spirituality measures across samples. Generally, results support that scale's construct and criterion validity and, consequently, the validity of the underlying construct of self-expansiveness.