The short form of the VIA Inventory of Strengths.

BACKGROUND: The VIA Institute on Character is offering the VIA-120 as the standard VIA Survey, replacing the original 240-item version. The present work involved the construction and the initial evaluation of the Spanish VIA-120 as a short version of the Spanish adaptation of the VIA-IS.

METHOD: This short form was developed using data from 2,143 Spanish-speaking adults. The Spanish VIA-120 was developed by selecting the five items with the highest corrected item-total correlations from the 10 items per subscale of the Spanish VIA-IS.

RESULTS: Results lent support to the reliability and validity of this short form to measure the 24 character strengths included in The Values in Action (VIA) classification. The internal consistency coefficients of the subscales of the Spanish version of the VIA-120 were substantially equivalent to the long version. The VIA-120 showed high convergence with the Spanish VIA-IS in terms of descriptive statistics and associations with life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Factor structure congruence coefficients also indicated very high convergence between the VIA-IS and the short form.

CONCLUSIONS: The Spanish VIA-120 proved to be a reliable, valid instrument for the assessment of character strengths.