topic 2 - personality research methods

Question 1

what is the goal of research?

Answer 1

continuously improve on tentative answers to questions

Question 2

what is research education?

Answer 2

learning to question the world, to critically examine what we think we know about our existence, and learn the methodologies required to further our understanding

Question 3

what does Funder’s second law state?

Answer 3

there are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous

Question 4

what does Funder’s third law state?

Answer 4

something beats nothing, two times out of three

Question 5

what are the four types of personality data?

Answer 5

• S data (self-report)
• I data (informants’ reports)
• L data (life outcomes)
• B data (behavioural observations)

Question 6

what are the advantages of S data?

Answer 6

1. large amount of information
2. access to thoughts, feelings, and intentions
3. the data are true by definition if one is assessing what people think about themselves
4. causal force investigation (self-fulfilling prophecies and self-verification)
5. simple, easy, and cost effective

Question 7

what are the disadvantages of S data?

Answer 7

1. bias (overly positive or negative, desire for privacy, faking)
2. error (fish-and-water-effect, active distortion of memory, lack of self-insight, carelessness)
3. too simple and too easy

Question 8

what are the advantages of I data?

Answer 8

1. large amount of information
2. real-world basis
3. common sense (takes immediate context or situation into account
4. definitional truth
5. causal force (reputation affects opportunities and expectancies)

Question 9

what are the disadvantages of I data?

Answer 9

1. limited behavioural information
2. lack of access to private experience
3. error (mistake of memory or artifact of cognitive-emotional processing)
4. bias (systematic process of seeing someone more or less positively than they deserve)

Question 10

what is L data?

Answer 10

real-life facts about your life that might hold psychological significance

Question 11

how is L data obtained?

Answer 11

archival records or self-report

Question 12

what are the advantages of L data?

Answer 12

1. objective and verifiable
2. intrinsic importance
3. psychological relevance

Question 13

what is the disadvantage of L data?

Answer 13

multi-determination: outcomes or lived realities can have many causes

Question 14

what is B data?

Answer 14

• observations in daily life or in a lab

- certain personality tests

Question 15

what are the techniques to collecting natural B data?

Answer 15

• self-report
• direct measures
• social media analyses

Question 16

how is personality expressed in physical spaces/artifacts?

Answer 16

1. identity claims: make deliberate symbolic statements about the self
2. feeling regulators: artifacts and design attributes that are intended to manage our emotions and thoughts
3. behavioural residue: the physical traces we leave in our environment by our everyday actions

Question 17

what is impressions management?

Answer 17

deliberate attempts to present oneself in a way that makes a favourable (socially desirable) impression on others

Question 18

what is the main advantage of natural B data?

Answer 18

it’s realistic

Question 19

what are the disadvantages of natural B data?

Answer 19

1. difficult and expensive to use

2. some desired contexts, situations, or experiences seldomly occur in everyday life

Question 20

how is laboratory B data collected?

Answer 20

1. experiments:
   - make a situation happen and record data
   - examine reactions to situations
   - represent real-life contexts that are difficult to observe directly
2. physiological measures

Question 21

what are the advantages of laboratory B data?

Answer 21

1. range of contexts can be artificially produced

2. doesn’t rely on the reports of others

Question 22

what are the disadvantages of laboratory B data?

Answer 22

1. difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to gather and analyze
2. uncertain interpretation

Question 23

what is a case study?

Answer 23

closely studying a particular event or person of interest in order to find out as much as possible

Question 24

what are the advantages of the case study method?

Answer 24

1. describes the whole phenomenon/person
2. source for ideas
3. sometimes necessary

Question 25

what is the main disadvantage of the case study method?

Answer 25

unknown generalizability

Question 26

what is the experimental method?

Answer 26

a research technique that establishes the casual relationship between an independent variable (x) and a dependent variable (y) by randomly assigning participants to experimental groups characterized by differing levels of the independent variable (x), and measuring the average observable behaviour (y) that results in each group

Question 27

what is the correlation method?

Answer 27

a research technique that establishes the relationship between two variables by measuring both variables as they occur naturally in a sample of participants