Introduction: The California Psychological Inventory was developed for assessing personality characteristics of a normal population. This instrument has been standardized in different count- ries and has been used to assess academic success, managerial skills, creativity, maladjust-ment, antisocial behavior, and vulnerability to situational stress. The aim of this study was to standardize this questionnaire for the Iranian population.

Method: This study was of standardization type. After translation into Farsi and back trans-lation, the final form was prepared and administered to 1008 subjects (911 males, 97 females) who were selected via random stratified sampling procedure from the sites of a government department in nine provinces. The mean age of the subjects was 40.7 (S.D. 7.7) Cronbach’s alpha procedure and test-retest method was used to assess the reliability, and factor analysis was utilized to determine the validity of the questionnaire.

Results: The alpha coefficients for the questionnaire ranged from 0.30 for the F/M scale to 0.83 for the V3 scale with a median of 0.60. The overall alpha coefficient for the whole ques-tionnaire was 0.95. The Pearson correlation coefficient for the test-retest on 50 subjects after two weeks ranged from 0.47 for communality to 0.85 for independence scales. The factor analysis revealed three factors which were named Control, Extroversion, and Flexibility.