Introduction: We are now seeing an increasing need of the measurement of impulsivity by clinicians and researchers due to the present prevalence of impulsivity control disorders. The authors develop and validate a new tool for measuring impulsivity: the Impulsive Control Scale Ramón y Cajal (ECIRyC) that has 20 items.
Material and methods: The first version of ECIRyC was applied to a sample recruited from general population. From their responses the scale was reduced to the present version and the construct validity coefficients and the alpha reliability of Cronbach were calculated. Also, the scores of the ECIRyC were standardized.
Results and discussion: The Factor Analysis of the ECIRyC shows that there are five factors explaining 53% of the total variance obtained. This factorial structure is practically unidimensional. In the same way, the reliability of ECIRyC is high; obtaining the same score (0.85) with the Cronbach alpha intraclass correlation coefficient as with the two halves procedure plus the Spearman-Brown correction. The ECIRyC has proven to have a very good convergent validity with other foreign impulsivity measurement instruments. The ECIRyC scores, obtained with general population show a normal distribution which has permitted their standardization for applicating them both to large groups of people and to single individuals. All the initial validation data of the ECIRyC seem to show that it is a useful tool for the evaluation of impulsivity.