In the early 1990s, leadership educators gathered to create a model of college student leadership that focused on social change. They conceived the Social Change Model of Leadership Development, which views leadership as a process toward social change, instead of a position or individual.
Using the Social Change Model as a base, Tracy Tyree designed an instrument to measure the eight values of the model for her dissertation at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1998. The purpose of Tyree’s study was to:
- develop an instrument that measures a process of socially responsible leadership for college students
- operationalize the Social Change Model
The Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) emerged from Tyree’s research. Through rigorous design including tests for content validity and a pilot study, the initial SRLS was a 104-item survey that measured the eight values of the Social Change Model.
After the development of the original scale, the SRLS became the property of the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs (NCLP). On behalf of the NCLP, the instrument was reduced by Cara Appel-Silbaugh, who revised the original instrument to decrease the number of questions, while retaining reliability and validity. This version is referred to as SRLS-R.
In 2005, John Dugan further revised the instrument for use as the core of the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) 2006. The SRLS-R2 is a 68-item version of the original instrument and is used in the SRLSonline and the MSL-2006.