In plain language
“Personal growth initiative” (PGI) is the tendency to be aware of, and actively engaged in, your own self-improvement — knowing when change is needed, planning it, drawing on outside help, and following through. The most widely used measure of this tendency, the Personal Growth Initiative Scale-II (PGIS-II), was developed in English, and it was unknown whether a Persian version would work well for adolescents in Iran.
In an online survey, 1,453 high school students in Tehran (50.8% girls, average age about 15.5 years) completed the Persian PGIS-II, along with the Youth Self-Report measure of internalizing problems (like anxiety and depression) and externalizing problems (like aggression and rule-breaking), plus demographic questions.
The Persian PGIS-II held up well. It reproduced the original four-factor structure — readiness for change, planfulness, using resources, and intentional behavior — measured the same construct in boys and girls, and showed good to excellent reliability. Crucially, adolescents higher in personal growth initiative reported fewer behavior problems and better school performance. The authors conclude that clinicians and school counselors could target PGI as a key mechanism for preventing adolescent behavior problems and boosting academic performance.
Key findings
- The original 4-factor structure of the PGIS-II (readiness for change, planfulness, using resources, intentional behavior) showed the best fit in confirmatory factor analysis of the Persian version.
- The scale was invariant across gender, meaning it measures personal growth initiative equivalently in boys and girls.
- Reliability estimates — item-total correlations, inter-item correlations, Cronbach's alpha, Theta and Omega — were good to excellent (alphas of .86 to .95).
- Higher PGI was moderately associated with fewer internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (r = −.20 to −.42), supporting concurrent validity.
- PGI and its subscales correlated positively with educational performance (r = .21 to .34).
- Boys scored higher than girls on overall PGI and on the “using resources” subscale; the measure is recommended for use in the Persian context.
How to cite
APA
Habibi Asgarabad, M., Salehi Yegaei, P., Bromandnia, P., Ciarrochi, J., Mastrotheodoros, S., & Wiium, N. (2025). Personal growth initiative: Confirmatory factor analysis, gender invariance, and external validity of the Persian version. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1576783. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1576783
BibTeX
@article{habibiasgarabad2025personal,
title = {Personal growth initiative: confirmatory factor analysis, gender invariance, and external validity of the {Persian} version},
author = {Habibi Asgarabad, Mojtaba and Salehi Yegaei, Pardis and Bromandnia, Parishad and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Mastrotheodoros, Stefanos and Wiium, Nora},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychology},
year = {2025},
volume = {16},
pages = {1576783},
doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1576783}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.