Personality Psychology

PSYC305A: PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER 2: PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT, MEASUREMENT AND RESEARCH DESIGN

SOURCES OF PERSONALITY DATA
SELF-REPORT DATA (S-DATA): information a person reveals
- Most common method for measuring personality
- Obtained through: interviews, periodic reports, questionnaires (most common)
- Advantages:
o Individuals have access to lots of information about themselves
 E.g. level of anxiety, emotions, feelings, desires, beliefs and private experiences
- Disadvantages:
o Respondents must be willing to and be able to answer the questions
o Respondents not always honest
 Especially asked about unconventional experiences/desires/sex practices/traits
o Some people may lack self-knowledge
- UNSTRUCTURED QUESTIONS: open-ended
o E.g. tell me about the parties you like the most
o Twenty statements test blank paper with ) am repeated 20 times
- STRUCTURED QUESTIONS: forced (true-and-false questions)
o E.g. ) like loud and crowded parties – true or false
o Most common include TRAIT-DESCRIPTIVE ADJECTIVES (e.g. active, ambitious, anxious etc)
then asked which term describes them
o Common:
 ACL (Adjective Checklist)
 Personality scales (rating scales)
 NEO Personality Inventory (1-5 Likert scale strong disagree to strongly agree)
 CPI (California Psychological Inventory) – read statements and asked if agree/disagree
- EXPERIENCE SAMPLING: people answer some questions everyday for several weeks or longer
o Contact one or more times a day at random interviews to complete measures
o Good for obtaining information about how a person’s trait changes over time

OBSERVER-REPORT DATA (O-DATA): using other people to gather information about a person’s
personality
- Advantages:
o Observes may have access to information not attainable through other sources (e.g.
impressions)
o Multiple observers can be use to assess each individual
 INTER-RATER RELIABILITY: allow investigator to evaluate degree of agreement among
observers
 Reducing idiosyncratic features and biases of single observers
- SELECTION OF OBSERVERS
1. Use professional personality assessors who don’t know the participant in advance
o Disadvantage: professional observers can’t witness the more PR)VATE actions of a person;
depend on PUBLIC ACTIONS
2. Use individual who actually now the target participants
o Advantage
 Observers are in better position to observe the target’s natural behavior
 MULTIPLE SOCIAL PERSONALITIES: our manifest personalities change in different social
settings
o Disadvantage: observer may be bias (may overlook negative and emphasize positives)
- NATURALISTIC VERSUS ARTIFICIAL OBSERVATION

, o NATURALISTIC OBSERVATION: observers witness and record events that occur in normal
course of lives of the participants
 Able to secure information in realistic context of a person’s everyday life
 Can not control events and behavioral samples witnessed

TEST DATA (T-DATA): standardized tests
- Observe to see if people react differently to an identical situation
- Situations are designed to elicit behaviors that serve as indicators of personality variables
- Control the context and eliminate extraneous sources of influence
- E.g. situations where they have to appoint a leader/follower
- Advantage: can set up conditions to reveal key indicators of personality
- Disadvantages:
o Participants may guess measured trait and alter response to create specific impression
o Difficult to verify how the participants and experimenter define the testing situation
obedience to authority misinterpreted as test for intelligence )
o Situations are interpersonal: researcher (friendly vs cold) may influence how participants
behave
1. MECHANICAL RECORDING DEVICES
o actometer to assess differences in activity or energy level (strapped to arms or legs)
o Advantage: Data can be obtained in relatively naturalistic settings
o Disadvantage: no mechanical device for introversion or conscientiousness
2. PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA
o Provide information about level of arousal, reactivity to various stimuli etc.
o Theory about psychopaths: they don’t have normal fear or anxiety response that most people
have  eyeblink startle reflex
 Startle reflex: blinking of eyes, lowering chin toward chest, inhaling suddenly
 Psychopaths didn’t have startle reflex when viewing anxiety-producing photographs
o FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (FMRI): used to identify areas of brain that
light up when performing certain task as verbal problems/spatial navigation problems
 Gauges the amount of oxygen brought to particular places in brain (via blood)
 Advantage: difficult for participants to fake responses
 Disadvantage: must compare activated state vs resting state
3. PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES: person given standard stimulus and asked what they see
 E.g. inkblots by Hermann Rorschach
 Assumes they person projects their concerns, conflicts, traits and ways of seeing or
dealing with the world onto the ambiguous stimulus

LIFE-OUTCOME DATA (L-DATA): information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and
outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny
- E.g. marriages and divorces are public record, speeding tickets, ownership of gun
- Often use S-data and O-data to predict L-data

ISSUES IN PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT
1. Links among various data sources
o Agreed varies depending on particular trait and observability of the trait
 Observable traits (extraversion) show higher degree of self-observer agreement than traits
(calculating)
o Advantage (using multiple measures)
 Able to average out idiosyncrasies
o Disadvantage (linkage among sources)

,  Whether sources are viewed as alternative measures of same construct or as assessment
of different phenomena (e.g. different behavioral samples)
 Lack of agreement doesn’t NECESSAR)LY signify measurement error
2. Fallibility of Personality Measurement
o TRIANGULATION: examine results that transcend data sources

EVALUATION OF PERSONALITY MEASURES
RELIABILITY: degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of trait being measured
1. REPEATED MEASUREMENT: repeated measurement over time
o Two test highly correlated  high TEST-RETEST RELIABILITY
2. Examine relationships among the items themselves at single point in time
o Items within a test all correlate  INTERNAL CONSISTENCY RELIABILITY
o )nternal because it’s assessed within the test itself
3. Obtain measurements from multiple observers
a. Different observers agree with each other  high INTER-RATER RELIABILITY

RESPONSE SETS/NON-CONTENT RESPONDING: tendency of some people to respond to questions on a
basis that is unrelated to the question content
- ACQUIESCENCE: tendency to simple agree with questionnaire items regardless of content
o Counteract by intentionally reverse-scoring some questionnaire items
- EXTREME RESPONDING: tendency to give endpoint responses
- SOCIAL DESIRABILITY: tendency to answer items in way to come across as socially attractive or
likeable
o Want to make good impression, appear well adjusted and good citizens
o Represents distortion and should be eliminated or minimized (most personality psychologists
think this)
o Valid part of other desirable personality traits (e.g. happiness, conscientiousness or
agreeableness) – positive illusions related to better physical health
 Self-Deceptive Enhancement subscale: tap self-deceptive overconfidence
o Resolutions
 Assume that ere are erroneous or deceptive participants (remove it statistically form other
questionnaire responses)
 Develop questionnaires that are less susceptible to this type of responding (select items
found not to correlate with social desirability)
 FORCED-CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRE format: confronted with pairs of statements and
asked to indicate which statement is more true of them
 Equally socially desirable vs undesirable statements (read book vs see movie)

VALIDITY: extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure

GENERALIZABILITY: degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts

RESEARCH DESIGNS IN PERSONALITY
EXPERIMENTAL METHODS: typically used to determine CAUSALITY (fid out whether one variable
INFLUENCES another variable)
- Key requirements of good experimental design
o MANIPULATION of 1 or more variables
o RANDOM ASSIGNMENT: Ensuring that participants in each experimental condition are
equivalent to each other at the beginning of the study
 COUNTERBALANCING: participants in both conditions

,  E.g. personality theory: extraverts prefer more stimulation and introverts prefer
fewer (noisy and silent conditions, switch both up  result: extravert made fewer
errors in noisy condition and more errors in quiet condition and vice versa)
 Allow experimenter to rule out ORDER EFFECTS
- MEAN: average
- STANDARD DEVIATION: measure of variability within each condition
- T-test: calculate difference between 2 means
- P-value: see whether difference is large enough to be called significantly different (p < .05)
- STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT: different between means would be likely to occur not y chance
- Advantage: good for establishing causal relationships among variables
- Disadvantage: poor at identifying relationships among variables as they occur naturally in everyday
life

CORRELATIONAL STUDIES: statistical procedure used for determining whether there is a relationship
between 2 variables
- CORRELATION COEFFICIENT: for gauging relationships between variables (+1.00=positively related,
0=unrelated, -1.00=negatively related)
- DIRECTIONALITY PROBLEM: if A and B are correlated; don’t know if A is the cause of B or vice versa
- THIRD VARIABLE PROBLEM: 2 variables can be correlated because of a 3 unknown variable
- Advantage: suited for establishing relationships between 2 or more variables that occur in everyday
life
- Disadvantage: poor at establishing causality

CASE STUDIES: examining the life of one person in-depth as case study
- Advantages:
o Find out about personality in great detail (hard in large samples)
o Provide in-depth knowledge of particularly outstanding individuals
o Good for generating hypotheses that can be tested later using correlational/experimental
method
- E.g. an attention-seeking boy
- E.g. serial killer Ted Bundy; so-called serial killer triad (torturing animals while young, starting
destructive fires, bedwetting)
- Disadvantages
o Study on one person can’t be generalized to everyone

WHEN TO USE EXPERIMENTAL, CORRELATIONAL AND STUDY DESIGN