Response: Choice and Ethics in Listening Situations

We developed a new listening scale pertaining to how one likes to be listened to by others. Specifically, we constructed items by adapting the Listening Style Profile (LSP)-16 and a Constructive Listening subscale taken from the Facilitative Listening Scale and tested the validity of the scale against the Big Five personality traits. A survey (N = 195) suggested that (a) the factor structure of the adapted LSP-16 items yielded the expected four factors, albeit with items not loading on factors as expected in the original LSP-16; (b) the people facet of the LSP-16 is strongly correlated with a scale of constructive listening, r = .70; and (c) both the people facet of the LSP-16 and the constructive-listening behaviors scale are correlated with all of the Big Five personality traits, save for neuroticism. These listening scales showed a moderate correlation with a summary of all of the Big Five scales, known as General Factor of Personality, r = .38. Among the implications is the possibility that the more adjusted a person is, the more the person prefers to be listened to with a people-listening style or by a constructive listener.