Factorial Structure of the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ- 40)

The defense style questionnaire was examined through factor analyses on clinical and non-clinical samples by several researchers, namely Bond (1983), Andrews et al.(1993). Although their findings are somehow similar, there are some contradictions in their final there is not total consistency among different existing results. The present study is the factor analysis of this questionnaire with a total sample of 666 Iranian high school students and 401 university students. The objective of this study was identifying the number of factors related to their defense styles. The results of explorative parallel factor analysis indicated that in the whole statistical population (n=1067), three distinct factors were observed. In spite of differences of defense mechanism types embodied in each style, our results are in accordance with the early data reported by Andrew et al. (1993) and the findings of other researchers.