Kashyapa Prakriti Inventory: Development and Initial Standardization

Several inventories have been designed to evaluate states of peoples’ doshas, fundamental concepts in Ayurveda. The state of doshas at birth, the Prakriti, and their imbalanced states, Vikriti, are central to Ayurvedic diagnosis. An inventory assessing Vikriti in adolescent school children has been published. Here we present a questionnaire designed to assess Dosha Prakriti in adolescents, for which there is still a need, since problems can arise when administering adult questionnaires to younger age groups; hence, this inventory. The resulting instrument has been named the Kashyapa Prakriti Inventory. To draw up the new inventory, characteristics (Lakshanas) of each dosha were selected from Ayurveda’s classic texts to assess its dominance. Questions descriptive of each Lakshana were formulated, and the resulting questionnaire was sent for a Delphi round of consultations to five psychologists and ten Ayurvedic doctors. The initial set of 87 questions reduced to 84 questions. This process effectively provided the scale content validity. It was administered to 521 students aged 13-18 at two education centres in Bengaluru. Final data was obtained on 501, a 3.8 % attrition rate. Data analysis used SPSS 10.0. Consistency and reliability yielded Cronbach’s  values: Vata 0.549, Pitta 0.531, and Kapha 0.628. Spearman’s rho coefficient for split-half consistency was  = 0.438. Correlations between all pairs of doshas were negative. The Kashyapa Prakriti Inventory is thus a dosha assessment scale for adolescents. It quantifies physical and physiological characteristics representing general feeling, i. e. overall well-being, rather than pathology. It is both consistent and reliable.