New Driving Self-Esteem Questionnaire Measures How Good You Feel Behind the Wheel

Ask any driver what they think of their own abilities behind the wheel and you will almost certainly get a confident answer, often a very confident one. Yet psychologists have long known that how people feel about themselves in general does not always predict how they feel about themselves in specific situations. A person may hold a healthy overall sense of self-worth while quietly dreading multi-lane roundabouts, or carry modest general self-esteem while believing they are among the best drivers on the road. A research team led by David Herrero-Fernández of the Universidad Europea del Atlántico in Spain, working with colleagues in Romania and Mexico, has now built and rigorously tested the first dedicated instrument to capture this elusive construct: the Driving Self-Esteem Questionnaire, or DSEQ. The work, published in Current Psychology, offers traffic researchers a psychometrically sound tool for measuring how drivers evaluate their own competence on the road.

The theoretical motivation behind the study rests on a distinction that has shaped self-esteem research for decades. Global self-esteem, famously measured by Morris Rosenberg’s 1965 scale, reflects a person’s overall evaluation of their own worth. But since the 1970s, researchers such as Richard Shavelson and Herbert Marsh have argued that self-concept is hierarchical and multidimensional: general feelings of self-worth sit atop a structure of domain-specific evaluations covering academic ability, physical appearance, social relationships and more. Meta-analytic work, including a 2022 synthesis of longitudinal studies by Lea Dapp, Sandra Krauss and Ulrich Orth, has shown that these domain-specific feelings can feed upward into global self-esteem, and that the domains are meaningfully different from one another. Driving, the Spanish-led team argues, is a domain where this specificity matters enormously, because driving self-worth is entangled with anger, risk-taking and aggression in ways that general self-esteem only partly captures.

The evidence for that entanglement is substantial. Global self-esteem has repeatedly been shown to predict anger and aggressive behaviour both on and off the road, and studies of driving anger, going back to Jerry Deffenbacher’s Driving Anger Scale in 1994, have documented how hostile emotions behind the wheel translate into dangerous conduct. Earlier work by Herrero-Fernández and colleagues had already suggested that self-esteem acts as a distal predictor of trait driving anger, and a companion study published in 2026 in Transportation Research Part F pointed to driving self-esteem specifically as a moderator of the link between general anger and anger on the road. What was missing was a validated way to measure that driving-specific self-evaluation directly, rather than inferring it from general scales. The DSEQ was designed to fill exactly that gap.

To build the questionnaire, the researchers generated an item pool covering the everyday texture of driving self-worth: feeling like a good or skilled driver, staying calm on uphill starts, handling overtaking on two-way roads, feeling insecure every time one gets behind the wheel, or preferring that a licensed passenger take over because they would do it better. The final published item set, presented bilingually in Spanish and English, includes statements such as ‘I am a good driver’, ‘I feel fearful every time I approach a large roundabout or one with many lanes’ and ‘Nowadays, I would easily pass the practical driving test.’ The team then administered the items to 530 Spanish drivers with an average age of 30.55 years, of whom 67.4 percent were women, and subjected the responses to a battery of modern psychometric techniques.

The analytical approach was deliberately conservative. Because questionnaire responses are ordinal rather than continuous, the team used polychoric correlations rather than ordinary Pearson coefficients in their exploratory factor analyses, and applied parallel analysis to decide how many factors the data genuinely supported. The initial results hinted at a multidimensional structure, but the researchers traced this pattern to item wording effects, the well-documented tendency of positively and negatively phrased statements to cluster separately regardless of content, a phenomenon also seen in the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale itself. Once wording artifacts were accounted for, the data supported a unidimensional structure: a single underlying dimension of driving self-esteem. The team reinforced this conclusion with dedicated unidimensionality indices, including UniCo, ECV and MIREAL, statistics developed by Pere Ferrando and Urbano Lorenzo-Seva to test whether a scale truly measures one thing rather than several bundled together.

The final model showed adequate fit and high reliability, meaning the items consistently tap the same construct. Crucially, the researchers also tested measurement invariance across gender, confirming that the questionnaire functions equivalently for men and women at the configural, metric and scalar levels. This matters because gender differences in self-esteem are among the most replicated findings in social psychology, and any comparison between male and female drivers would be meaningless if the scale itself behaved differently in each group. With invariance established, researchers can now compare driving self-esteem across genders with confidence that any observed differences reflect real psychological differences rather than measurement artifacts.

Validity evidence came from relationships with external variables. As expected, driving self-esteem correlated positively with global self-esteem, confirming that the new scale is related to, but distinct from, the general construct. More strikingly, it correlated negatively with several dimensions of driving anger, the emotional responses measured by Deffenbacher’s framework, including anger at discourtesy, slow driving and other common provocations. Drivers who feel competent and secure behind the wheel appear to be less easily provoked into anger on the road, a pattern consistent with theories linking threatened self-worth to hostile reactions.

The incremental validity results were more nuanced. In hierarchical regression analyses, the team tested whether the DSEQ explained additional variance in driving anger outcomes beyond what global self-esteem already accounted for. The answer was yes, but selectively: the questionnaire added small but meaningful increases in explained variance for anger related to discourtesy and slow driving, while showing no incremental contribution for other dimensions. The authors interpret this as evidence of modest, domain-specific incremental validity, which is precisely what a domain-specific instrument should show. A driving-specific measure should not outperform general self-esteem everywhere; it should add predictive power exactly where the driving context is most psychologically relevant.

The practical implications extend well beyond the laboratory. Traffic psychology has long grappled with the paradox that overconfident drivers can be as dangerous as insecure ones, with studies showing that high implicit self-esteem predicts risky behaviours such as dangerous mobile phone use while driving. A validated measure of driving self-esteem gives intervention designers a target: programmes aimed at recalibrating drivers’ self-evaluations, whether inflated or deflated, can now assess whether they actually shift the construct they intend to change. The scale also opens the door to studying how driving self-esteem develops over the lifespan, how it relates to self-rated driving ability in older adults, and whether it moderates the well-documented pathway from driving anger to aggressive behaviour. The researchers note that the English version of the items is a direct translation of the original Spanish, and they advise any team adapting the DSEQ into other languages to follow the International Test Commission’s guidelines for test translation and adaptation.

For a field that has catalogued scales and inventories extensively, a 2026 review in Transportation Research Part F documented just how crowded the measurement landscape has become, the arrival of a new instrument demands justification. The DSEQ earns it by targeting a construct that general measures cannot reach: the specific self-worth a driver carries into the cabin. With a unidimensional structure, strong reliability, gender invariance and demonstrated incremental validity in the domains where driving anger bites hardest, the questionnaire gives researchers a precise instrument for one of the most consequential self-evaluations people make. Given that road traffic injuries remain a leading cause of death worldwide, understanding how drivers feel about themselves behind the wheel, and how those feelings fuel or defuse anger in traffic, is far more than an academic exercise. It is a step toward predicting, and ultimately preventing, the hostile encounters that turn ordinary journeys into dangerous ones.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a self-report questionnaire measuring driving-specific self-esteem in Spanish drivers

Article Title: Development and validation of the driving self-esteem questionnaire

Article References: Herrero-Fernández, D., Bogdan-Ganea, S. R., Martín-Ayala, J. L., & Vistorte, A. O. R. (2026). Development and validation of the driving self-esteem questionnaire. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1562. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10124-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10124-6

Keywords: driving self-esteem, DSEQ, psychometrics, driving anger, self-esteem, traffic psychology, questionnaire validation, measurement invariance, factor analysis, aggressive driving, Current Psychology, road safety