RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIVERSE MEASURES FOR TYPE-A PERSONALITY AND CORONARY ANGIOGRAPHIC FINDINGS

The two most widely used instruments for assessing Type A personality are the Jenkins Activity Survey and the Rosenman semi-structured interview. The agreement between these two scales was studied in a population of 103 men awaiting coronary angiography at Massachusetts General Hospital. Portions of the sample that were considered questionable because of scoring characteristics of the respective techniques were removed to determine whether these characteristics confounded the relationship between Type A behavior and angiographic findings. For the overall and subset analyses, the interview and the Jenkins Activity Survey were significantly associated. The exclusion of questionably classified subjects by either method of Type A assessment did not produce a significant relationship with extent of vessel disease. Problems in Type A classification then cannot account for our inability to discern an association between Type A behavior and degree of coronary artery disease. Instead, it would be well to consider the possibility that conflicting results on the association between Type A personality and angiographic findings may be attributable to differences in the population characteristics of each sample studied. © 1979.