Chapter 2 Methods in the Study of Personality

Question 1

Introspection

Answer 1

What am I like? Why do I do the things I do?

• look to your own experience
• Misrecall

Question 2

Case Studies

Answer 2

• Detailed, comprehensive descriptions of one person’s personality
• in-depth study of one person
• Long period of observation
• Unstructured interviews
• Repeated observations- confirm initial impressions or correct wrong impressions
• Reveal detail
• Insights
• Pertains to normal life
• Open ended- observer can follow whatever leads seem interesting, not just ask questions chosen ahead of time

Question 3

Personology

Answer 3

• Emphasized the need to study the person as a coherent entity
• Henry Murray

Question 4

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Answer 4

• Narratives reveal underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world
• You view a set of pictures and are asked to create a story about each one.
• Ambiguous pictures
• The themes in your stories will reflect your implicit motives
• Food-related TAT imagery after deprived of food for varying lengths of time
• Achievement imagery after group experienced success and failure- deprivation isn’t necessary to arouse a motive
• The motive can be aroused by any circumstances that point to the motive’s relevance.

Question 5

Criticisms of the TAT

Answer 5

• Low Internal Consistency (low correlation-Cronbach’s Alpha, among test items)
• Low Validity- matches clinical assessments at about chance level
• Proponents of the TAT say it is unfair to judge the test according to traditional psychometric measures.
• Findings do generalize to specific patient’s life, not necessary to generalize to population

Question 6

Experience Sampling

Answer 6

Diary Studies: Typically, users self-report their activities at regular intervals to create a log of their activities, thoughts, and frustrations

• Conducted across extended periods of times
• Repeatedly prompting the person under study to stop and report on some aspect of his or her current experience
• Don’t require the person to think back very far in time
• Less oppotunity for distortion in recalling
• Get the events more “on line”

Question 7

Idiographic

Answer 7

• Focus is on the individual
• Search within this informaiton for patterns of behavior within a given person across many situations
• Experience sampling and case study

Question 8

Generality/Generalizability

Answer 8

• How widely a conclusion can be applied
• The more people examined, the more convinced you can be that what you see is true of people in general
• Study people of many ages and from all walks of life-cultures

Question 9

Variable

Answer 9

• Dimension along which variations exist
• Must be at least two values or levels on that dimension, though some variables have an infinite number of values
• Ex: Sex (variable): male, female (values)
• Examine people who represent a range of levels of a given varaible is a second reason why it’s important to go beyond case studies.

Question 10

Correlation

Answer 10

• As you examine the variables across many people or instances, the values on the two tend to go together in a systematic way.
• Direction
• Strength

Question 11

Direction

Answer 11

• Expressed by whether correlation coefficient is positive or negative
• Positive, Negative, None
• If low values tend to go with low values and high values tend to go with high values= positively correlated
• High values on one dimension tend to go with low values on the other dimension= negatively correlated

Question 12

Strength

Answer 12

• Expressed by how close to 1 or -1 correlation coefficient is
• Sloppiness of the association between variables
• Degree of accuracy with which you can predict values on one dimension from values on the other one
• A perfect positive correlation- the strongest possible- means that the person who has the very highest on one variable also has the very highest value on the other

Question 13

Correlation Coefficient (r)

Answer 13

• Strength of a correlation is expressed by a number
• Absolutely perfect positive correlation= 1.0
• (-)0.6-0.8= strong
• (-)0.3-0.5= moderately strong
• Below (-) 0.3/0.2= poor
• 0.0= two variables aren’t related at all, random dots

Question 14

Scatterplot

Answer 14

• The variables are represented by lines at right angles
• The point where the lines meet is zero for both variables
• Being father away from zero on each line means having a larger value on that variable
• Two-dimension space

Question 15

Statistical Significance

Answer 15

• Significant: the correlation would have been that large or larger only rarely if no true relationship exists
• Probability under 5%- statistically significant
• Researchers concluded that the relationship is a real one, rather than a random occurrence.
• p

Question 16

Causality

Answer 16

• The relationship between a cause and an effect

* Correlational study often gives people strong intuitions about causality, but no more.

Question 17

Third Variable Problem

Answer 17

*Third variable, not measured, perhaps not even thought of- actually has a causal influence over both variables that were measured.

Question 18

Descriptive Statistics

Answer 18

*Their purpose is to give a description

Question 19

Inferential Statistics

Answer 19

• Let the researcher make inferences
• Show how likely the finding was, if there was no true relation. If it can be shown that the effect was very unlikely to have occurred, the researcher can infer that it’s real.
• The conclusion is always probabilistic.
• The odds that the inference was wrong in this case are extremely small. But the possibility does exist.
• Allow us to attach “confidence units” to our judgments, rather than procedures that lead infallibly to correct choices.

Question 20

Experimental Method

Answer 20

• Demonstrates cause and effect
• Researcher manipulates one variable- creates the existence of at least two levels of it
• Advantage: show cause and effect
• Disadvantage: uncertainty about which aspect of the manipulation was important
• Experiments on people usually involve events of relatively short duration, in carefully controlled conditions

Question 21

Independent Variable

Answer 21

• The one the researcher is manipulating; possible cause

* Predicted to cause change in the dependent variable

Question 22

Dependent Variable

Answer 22

• Variable that is measured/ effect
• When you do an experiment, you show that the manipulation causes the difference on the dependent measure- but you can’t always be completely sure what it was about the manipulation that did the causing.

Question 23

Experimental Control

Answer 23

• Making everything exactly the same except for what you manipulate
• Random Assignment
• Random Sampling

Question 24

Random Assignment

Answer 24

• Randomly assign each participant
• Treat any variable that can’t be controlled such as individual difference
• Tossing a coin or using a list of random numbers
• If you study enough people in the experiment, any important differences between people will balance out between the groups

Question 25

Correlational Studies

Answer 25

• Advantage: long periods and events that are much more elaborate
• Let you get information about events in which experimental manipulation would be unethical
• Examines naturally Occurring differences in people
• Cost: Can’t show cause of effect

Question 26

MultiFactor Studies

Answer 26

• Two variables are varied separately, which means creating all combinations of the various levels of the predictor variables
• Allow researchers to examine how different types of people respond to variations in situations
• More than one independent variable- each manipulated independently
• Sometimes both IVs are experimentally manipulated
• Sometimes 1 IV is manipulated while other is a pre-existing personality variable
• Sometimes yield main effects
• Sometimes yield interactions

Question 27

Experimental Personality Research

Answer 27

*Combines experimental procedures and individual differences

Question 28

Interaction

Answer 28

• When the effect of one variable changes at different levels of the second variable
• The effect of one variable (success vs. failure) differs across the two levels of the other variable (degree of self-esteem)
• Ex: people who are low in self-esteem perform worse after an inital failure than after a success. Among people high in self-esteem, however, this doesn’t occur.
• Find an interaction, it’s absolutely necessary to study more than one factor at a time.
• Interactions can take many forms.

Question 29

Main Effect

Answer 29

• How one independent variable affects the dependent variable
• When you find that a predictor variable is linked to the outcome in a systematic way, completely separate from the other predictor
• Ex: people of both initial self-esteem levels perform worse after a failure than after a success