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The VIA-Youth (Park & Peterson, 2006) is perhaps the most commonly administered youth measure of the Peterson and Seligman (2004) character strengths. This article is the first in a series describing revision of the VIA-Youth, with the goals of making the development process more transparent, targeting scale unidimensionality, achieving measurement invariance, and extending the age range to 8–17. A sample of 286 youth in three countries completed 198 candidate items, from which a 98-item inventory was developed. Ratings of strengths were provided for 250 of the youth by 202 parents and 164 teachers. The relative size of relationships between informants was related to youth age, and to ratings of the observability and evaluativeness of the strengths, in the expected direction. The findings suggest youth self-report of character strengths and ratings by significant others are not highly related, but are consistent with prior studies of informant convergence in youth ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The VIA Classification characterizes six culturally defined virtues as latent variables underlying 24 character strengths. Factor analyses of measures based on the Classification usually suggest 4–5 factors that do not correspond well to traditional lists of virtues. This article describes the identification of a three-virtue model across multiple measures of strengths in four samples encompassing 1,070,549 cases. The general pattern involved a first component representing good character that split into two components reflecting Goodness and Inquisitiveness. The former divided further into components reflecting Caring and Self-Control. This pattern recurred in all data sets. The model consisting of Caring, Inquisitiveness, and Self-Control is proposed as a reliable latent structure for the VIA Classification strengths, an intuitive classification of traditional cultural virtues, and a framework for social efforts encouraging the development of virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]