Ch. 2 pesonality

Information provided by a person, such as through a survey or interview

Individuals have access to a wealth of information about themselves that is inaccessible to anyone else

open ended

response options provided

• people may not respond honestly
• people may lack accurate self-knowledge

informaiton provided by someone else about another person

Provide access to information not attainable through other sources

Multiple observers can be used to assess a person

Professional personality assessors

People who actually know the target person

• - Allows for assessment of multiple social personalities
• - May be biased

Observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of lives of the participants

con: cant control the situations

occurs in artificial settings or situations

advantage: controlling conditions and eliciting relevant behavior

con: sacrificing realism

Information provided by standardized tests or testing situations

Idea is to see if different people behave differently in identical situations

Situation designed to elicit behaviors that serve as indicators of personality

• Elicited behavior “scored” without
• reliance on inference

Participants might try to guess what trait is being measured and then alter their behavior to create certain impressions

Difficult to know if participants define testing situation as intended by experimenter

Researcher might influence how participants behave

Information that can be gleaned from events, activities, and outcomes in a person’s life that is available for public scrutiny—e.g., marriage, speeding tickets

Can serve as important source of “real life” information about personality

Links among different data sources

Fallibility of personality measurement

• All sources of data have limitations
• Results that replicate through “triangulation” are most powerful

Degree to which measure represents “true” level of trait being measured

• Types of reliability:
• - Test-retest reliability
• - Inter-rater reliability
• - Internal consistency reliability

Degree to which test measures what it claims to measure

• Types of validity:
• - Face validity
• - Predictive or criterion validity
• - Convergent validity
• - Discriminant validity
• - Construct validity

Degree to which measure retains validity across different contexts, including different groups of people and different conditions

Generalizability subsumes reliability and validity

Greater generalizability not always better; what is important is to identify empirically contexts in which a measure is and is not applicable

Used to determine causality—whether one variable causes another

• Two key requirements:
• - Manipulation of variables
• - Ensuring that participants in each experimental condition are equivalent to each other

- Correlation is a statistical procedure for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables

- Designed to identify “what goes with what” in nature, and not designed to identify causal relationships

- Major advantage is that it allows us to identify relationships among variables as they occur naturally

Correlation coefficient varies from –1 (perfect negative relationships) through 0 (no relationship) to +1 (perfect positive relationship)

• Correlation does not indicate causation
• - Directionality problem
• - Third variable problem

In-depth examination of the life of one person

Can find out about personality in great detail

Can give insights into personality that can be used to formulate a more general theory that is tested on a larger sample

Can provide in-depth knowledge about an outstanding figure, such as a political or religious figure

Results based on the study of single person cannot be generalized to others

Each design has strengths and weakness; strength of one is weakness of another

Which design a researcher uses depends on the research question and the goal of research

Taken together, three designs provide complementary methods for exploring personality