College of Public Health and Human Sciences

In this paper we present domain-specific measures of academic and social self-regulation in young adults. We base our scales on Baltes and colleagues’ Selection, Optimization, and Compensation (SOC) model, and establish the factor structure of our new measures using data collected from a sample of 152 college students. We then compare the predictive validity of our scales to that of a domain-general version of the original SOC questionnaire. Our results support the internal and external validity of the academic SOC scale, although support for the social SOC scale is more tentative than support for our academic measure. We discuss these scales as useful supplements to the existing SOC questionnaire.