Midterm #1 Flashcards
Personality
Def: a dynamic organization inside a person of psychophysical systems that create the person’s patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings
•Organization: personality is an organized/predictable system
•Dynamic: personality responds differently to certain circumstances/contexts
•Psychophysical: rooted in biology
•Create: personality creates our behaviours, thoughts, and feelings
•Patterns: consistency/sameness
•Behaviour, thoughts, and feelings: multiple levels of personality
Goals of personality
1) Descriptive: describe someones personality
2) Explanatory: explain someones personality (where it came from)
3) Predictive: ability to predict behaviour, thoughts and feelings (relevant in clinical, military, corporate settings)
Theory vs construct
Theory: explanation or interpretation of the relations among constructs
•Serves two functions:
1) Synthesizing function: organize and explain observations
2) Heuristic function: generate predictions (hypotheses)
Construct: conceptual or hypothetical variable that can’t be directly observed
•Ex: consciousness, aggressiveness, intelligence, self esteem
Criteria to evaluate a theory *
1) Comprehensiveness: does the theory explain the majority of observations to date
2) Heuristic value: does the theory generate predictions of interest/value (drive research)
3) Parsimony: does the theory explain the phenomenon of interest using as few constructs as possible
4) Testability: does the theory generate hypotheses that can be empirically tested
5) Falsifiability: does the theory generate hypotheses that can be disproven
* Horoscopes: testable but not falsifiable
How is research used to test a theory
Operationalization: the translation of a construct into a variable that can be observed/measured
•Ex1: aggression (construct) can become measurable through testing the frequency and intensity of shocks given to someone
•Ex2: self esteem (construct) becomes measurable through self-report
Relationship between theory and research
Interactive relationship: theory – hypothesis – operationalizations – research
•used in experiments, correlational studies, case studies, etc.
Personality measurement techniques
Personality variables are operationalized using techniques such as:
•Observer ratings: interviews, behavioural observations, informal data from someone other than the person being studied
•Implicit assessments: ink blots, picture story (finds out what a person is like without directly asking)
•Ex: Implicit association test (measures memories that are hard to detect (motives) through introspection
•Self reports (questionnaires):
*twenty statements test (i am ___ x20)
*true/false, adjective checklists, structured self report (rosenberg’s self esteem scale – 1-5 disagree thing)
*Inventory: a measure that assesses several dimensions of personality
Reliability
Def: the consistency of the measure assessing the construct (three forms):
1) Internal consistency: used for multi-item measures (questionnaires), reflecting the degree that the items in a measure produce similar responses assessed in two ways
•Split-half reliability coefficient: splitting the items in half and calculating the correlation between participants scores on the two halves and if the separate sums are similar, shows a correlation (rarely used without cronbach)
•Cronbach: Take the outcome of each item in the measure, and average the resulting correlation ( over .75)
Reliability cont.
2) Inter-rater reliability
•Used when observer ratings are obtained from 2+ observers, reflecting the degree that the scores from different observers are consistent (reliable) with one another
3) test-retest reliability
•Can be used for all types of measures, reflecting the degree that participants scores on a measure at one time are consistent with their scores at another time
*Involves calculating the correlation between both test scores
Validity
Def: the degree to which a measure assesses the construct that it’s intended to measure
• Operational definition matches the conceptual definition = higher validity
Types:
1) Construct validity: the measure (assessment devise) reflects the construct (the concept) that the study has in mind (most important validity)
2) Face validity: degree to which a measure appears to tap the construct being studied (not always accurate - social desirability)
Validity cont.
3) Criterion validity/predictive validity: tests how well the measure correlates to the behaviour of interest
• Ex: self reposts of dominance, bring people into a lab, then see if measures such as how often they suggested or gave instructions occurred most among the participants considered dominant on the self reports
4) Convergent validity: degree that the measure correlates to measures of theoretically related constructs
•Ex: dominance should relate a bit to measures such as leadership (positively) or shyness (inversely), and if it doesn’t, your measure may not be assessing dominance
5) Discriminant validity: degree to which the measure does not correlate with unrelated constructs
•Defence against third party variable problem
Trait perspective
Def: personality is best described as a constellation of traits (anxious, conscientious, outgoing)
•Most commonly used personality perspective
•Traits are a descriptive summary of behaviour
*Peter is jealous: jealous describes peters behaviour
Comprehensive taxonomy of personality traits
1) Eysenck’s PEN
Type A: Phlegmatic (passive, controlled, careful, peaceful, reliable, thoughtful)
Type B: Melancholic (quiet, pessimistic, anti-social, sober, rigid, moody)
Type C: Sanguine (sociable, friendly, outgoing, responsive, talkative, lively)
Type D: Choleric (active, optimistic, excitable, agressive, impulsive, changeable)
2)
Comprehensive taxonomy of personality traits
3) the five factor (big five) taxonomy: OCEAN
•Most widely accepted taxonomy (emerged from decades of research)
•Developed through factor analysis: statistical method used to identify groups of highly inter correlated traits that reflected 5 super personality dimensions
Testing OCEAN
Structured self report items (give a list of personality descriptions that can be grouped)
•High scores on first three predicts low scores on second three and vice versa
•Then give these groups a personality dimension label (first cluster – openness to experience)
