Chapter 2 Flashcards
Self-Report Data
Information a person reveals about their feelings or beliefs.
Structured Personality Test
Self-report can take a variety of forms, ranging from open-ended questions to forced-choice true or false questions.
Likert Rating Scale
A way for someone to express with numbers the degree to which a particular trait describes themselves.
Personality Scale
Summing scores on a series of individual rating scales.
Experience Sampling
People answer questions about moods or physical symptoms, every day for several weeks or longer.
Observer-Report Data
Impressions and evaluations others make of a person whom they come into contact with.
Inter-Rater Reliability
Use of multiple observers allows investigators to evaluate the degree of agreement among observers.
Multiple Social Personalities
Each of us displays different sides of ourselves to different people; we may be kind to our friends, ruthless to our enemies, loving toward a spouse and conflicted toward our parents.
Naturalistic Observation
Observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the lives of their participants.
Test Data
Common source of personality-relevant information comes from standardized tests.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
Technique used to identify the areas of the brain that light-up when performing certain tasks such as verbal problems or spatial navigation problems. Based on the oxygen levels and blood levels.
Projective Techniques
The person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees.
Life-Outcome Data
Information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny.
Reliability
Degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of the trait being measured.
Repeated Measurement
Repeat a measurement over time.
Test-Retest Reliability
Take a certain test one time, then later take that same test.
Internal Consistency Reliability
Examine relationships among the items themselves at a single point in time. If they are repeated in that same measurement, it has reliability. It is assessed within the test itself.
Response Set
How individuals respond to a set of questions negatively for research.
Noncontent Responding
Tendency of some people to respond to the questions on some basis that is unrelated to the question content.
Acquiescence
Yea-saying to every response.
Extreme Responding
The tendency to give endpoint responses, and to avoid middle responses.
Social Desirability
Tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable.
Forced-Choice Questionnaire
Test-takers are confronted with pairs of statements and are asked to indicate which statement in each pair is more true of them.
Validity
Extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure.
Face Validity
Whether the test, from face value, measures what it is supposed to measure.
Predictive Validity
Whether the test predicts criteria external to the test.
Criterion Validity
Whether a test predicts criteria external to the test.
Convergent Validity
Whether a test correlates with other measures that is should correlate with.
Discriminant Validity
What a measure should not correlate with.
Construct Validity
A test that measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it is supposed to correlate with, and does not correlate with what it is not supposed to correlate with.
Theoretical Constructs
Hypothetical internal entities useful in describing and explaining differences between people.
Generalizability
Degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts.
Experimental Methods
Used to determine causality; whether one variable influences another variable.
Manipulation
Researchers conducting experiments use manipulation in order to evaluate the influence of one variable on another.
Random Assignment
Randomly assign participants in a study to a group or condition.
Counterbalancing
In some experiments, manipulation is within a single group.
Mean
Average of all participants
Standard Deviation
Measure of variability within each condition.
T-Test
Used to calculate the difference between two means.
Statistically Significant
Refers to the probability of finding the results of a research study by chance alone.
Correlational Method
Statistical procedure is used for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables.
Correlation Coefficient
Used to gauge the relationships between variables.
Magnitude
How large or small the relationship is.
Directionality Problem
If A and B are correlated, we do not know if A is the cause of B, vice versus.
Third Variable Problem
If it is not A or B variables, it might be C or a third variable.
Case Study Method
Examining the life of one person in particular depth, which can give researchers insights into personality that can then be used to formulate a more general theory that is tested in a larger population.
