BLRI)
Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory (by ELIZABETH FREIRE & SOTI GRAFANAK
Description of the instrument
The BLRI comprises four subscales: ‘Empathic Understanding共情式理解’, ‘Level of Regard关注程度’, ‘Unconditionality无条件性’, and ‘Congruence一致性’. Barrett-Lennard (1962) considered that the concept of Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR) could not be treated as a unitary dimension or single variable, and therefore he separated UPR into two distinct variables: ‘Level of Regard’ and ‘Unconditionality’. In the initial version of the instrument, Barrett-Lennard (1962) had included a fifth variable called ‘Willingness to be known’ but the results for this variable were ambiguous and he decided to drop it from later versions of the inventory. However, some elements of this scale were absorbed into the Congruence dimension (Barrett-Lennard, 1978, 1986).
The BLRI is structured as a self-report questionnaire, with a six-point bipolar rating scale ranging from -3 (‘NO, I strongly feel that it is not true’) to +3 (‘YES , I strongly feel that it is true’). The 64-item BLRI (Barrett-Lennard, 1978), the version most widely used today (Barrett-Lennard, 1998; 2003), contains 16 items (8 positively worded and 8 negatively worded) for each of the four sub-scales. Examples of items from the 64-item client form (Other-to-Self, or OS) are presented in the table below.
Clients are asked to mentally insert the name of the therapist in the underlined space in each item.
SUBSCALE
ITEMS
37. Level of Regard (+)
______ is friendly and warm toward me.
33. Level of Regard (-)
______ just tolerates me.
30. Empathic Understanding (+)
_____ realises what I mean even when I havedifficulty in saying it.
58. Empathic Understanding (-)
______’s response to me is usually so fixed and automatic that I don’t get through to him/her.
51. Unconditionality (+)
Whether thoughts and feelings I express are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ makes no difference to ______’s feeling toward me.
11. Unconditionality (-)
Depending on the way I am, ______ has a better (or worse) opinion of me sometimes than at other times.
12. Congruence (+)
I feel that ______ is real and genuine with me.
52. Congruence (-)
There are times when I feel that ______’s outward response to me is quite different from the way he/she feels underneath.