It was created by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, researchers in the field of positive psychology, in order to operationalize their handbook Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV).
[1] Traditional psychology benefited from the creation of DSM, as it provided researchers and clinicians with the same set of language from which they could talk about the negative.
As a first step in remedying this disparity between tradition and positive psychology, Peterson and Seligman set out to identify, organize, and measure character.
They began by defining the notion of character as traits that are possessed by an individual and are stable over time, but can still be impacted by setting and thus are subject to change.
They examined ancient cultures (including their religions, politics, education, and philosophies) for information about how people in the past construed human virtue.
[1]: 13 Peterson and Seligman then moved down the hierarchy to identify character strengths, which are “the psychological processes or mechanisms that define the virtues”.
[1]: 13 The researchers began identifying individual character strengths by brainstorming with a group of noted positive psychology scholars.
[1] Peterson and Seligman then performed an exhaustive literature search for work that directly addresses good character in the domains of, “psychiatry, youth development, philosophy, and psychology”.
[1]: 15 Some individuals who influenced Peterson's and Seligman's choice of strengths include: Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, Ellen Greenberger, Marie Jahoda, Carol Ryff, Michael Cawley, Howard Gardner, and Shalom Schwartz.
For example, the researchers examined Hallmark greeting cards, personal ads, graffiti, bumper stickers, and profiles of Pokémon characters.
[1] Peterson and Seligman state that they are not as concerned with how the 24 strengths are grouped into virtue clusters because, in the end, these traits are mixed together to form the character of a person.
To solve this problem, Peterson and Seligman designed a new measure, the VIA-IS, to assess all 24 strengths in relatively brief amount of time.
[6][7] Although researchers have not yet examined the validity and reliability of the VIA-IS, they are beginning to look at how the 24 character strengths are distributed within the United States and international populations.
Researchers found that, within the United States, the most commonly endorsed strengths are kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, and judgment.
[8] The researchers did not find regional differences in the rank-order of strengths, with the exception of the South demonstrating slightly higher scores for religiousness.
[9] This finding provides evidence to support Peterson and Seligman's assertion[1] that their classification system is composed of universally acknowledged strengths.
In terms of statistically significant gender differences, women demonstrated higher scores for interpersonal strengths (kindness, love, and social intelligence) and appreciation of beauty and gratitude.
[8] Once again, research supports Peterson and Seligman's assertion[1] that the strengths listed in the CSV and VIA-IS are present in the majority of cultures.
They confirmed that the Japanese version of the VIA-IS demonstrated face validity, test-retest reliability and internal consistency before administering it to young adults.
[11] The strengths of zest, curiosity, gratitude, and hope were significantly positively correlated with subjective measures of happiness for both populations.
The researchers attributed this finding to the fact that some of the items on the VIA-IS that assess religiousness were based on Western connotations of religiosity (e.g. monotheistic traditions).
This could explain the commonalities found between young adults in Japan and the U.S. Shimai and colleagues demonstrated that the VIA-IS can be successfully and accurately translated into other languages.
It attempts to present a measure of humanist ideals of virtue in an empirical, rigorously scientific manner, intended to provide a theoretical framework for practical applications for positive psychology.
[12] In an American Journal of Psychiatry review, C. Robert Cloninger wrote that the book's major accomplishment was to show that virtues could be measured in a "rigorous scientific manner".
[1] Researchers propose that if these programs used the VIA-IS, then they may discover unanticipated benefits of their interventions and that this would facilitate objective evaluation of its outcome.
The character strengths in the four factor model could be organized into the following four groups: Niceness, Positivity, Intellect, and Conscientiousness.
The researchers most likely did this because their results were plagued by the problem of strengths cross-loading on to multiple factors, similar to what occurred in Macdonald and colleagues' study.
[16] Clearly, empirical evidence casts doubt on the link proposed by Peterson and Seligman[1] between the 24 strengths and associated 6 higher order virtues.
[15] Once again, Brdar and Kashdan found that the 24 strengths did not fall into the six higher order virtues proposed by Peterson and Seligman.
McGrath also found that a lot of items that were part of original character strengths inventory (VIA-IS) were no more belonging to the same scales after confirmatory factor analyses.