topic 2 - personality research methods Flashcards
what is the goal of research?
continuously improve on tentative answers to questions
what is research education?
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
what does Funder’s second law state?
there are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous
what does Funder’s third law state?
something beats nothing, two times out of three
what are the four types of personality data?
- S data (self-report)
- I data (informants’ reports)
- L data (life outcomes)
- B data (behavioural observations)
what are the advantages of S data?
- large amount of information
- access to thoughts, feelings, and intentions
- the data are true by definition if one is assessing what people think about themselves
- causal force investigation (self-fulfilling prophecies and self-verification)
- simple, easy, and cost effective
what are the disadvantages of S data?
- bias (overly positive or negative, desire for privacy, faking)
- error (fish-and-water-effect, active distortion of memory, lack of self-insight, carelessness)
- too simple and too easy
what are the advantages of I data?
- large amount of information
- real-world basis
- common sense (takes immediate context or situation into account
- definitional truth
- causal force (reputation affects opportunities and expectancies)
what are the disadvantages of I data?
- limited behavioural information
- lack of access to private experience
- error (mistake of memory or artifact of cognitive-emotional processing)
- bias (systematic process of seeing someone more or less positively than they deserve)
what is L data?
real-life facts about your life that might hold psychological significance
how is L data obtained?
archival records or self-report
what are the advantages of L data?
- objective and verifiable
- intrinsic importance
- psychological relevance
what is the disadvantage of L data?
multi-determination: outcomes or lived realities can have many causes
what is B data?
- observations in daily life or in a lab
- certain personality tests
what are the techniques to collecting natural B data?
- self-report
- direct measures
- social media analyses
how is personality expressed in physical spaces/artifacts?
- identity claims: make deliberate symbolic statements about the self
- feeling regulators: artifacts and design attributes that are intended to manage our emotions and thoughts
- behavioural residue: the physical traces we leave in our environment by our everyday actions
what is impressions management?
deliberate attempts to present oneself in a way that makes a favourable (socially desirable) impression on others
what is the main advantage of natural B data?
it’s realistic
what are the disadvantages of natural B data?
- difficult and expensive to use
2. some desired contexts, situations, or experiences seldomly occur in everyday life
how is laboratory B data collected?
- experiments:
- make a situation happen and record data
- examine reactions to situations
- represent real-life contexts that are difficult to observe directly - physiological measures
what are the advantages of laboratory B data?
- range of contexts can be artificially produced
2. doesn’t rely on the reports of others
what are the disadvantages of laboratory B data?
- difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to gather and analyze
- uncertain interpretation
what is a case study?
closely studying a particular event or person of interest in order to find out as much as possible
what are the advantages of the case study method?
- describes the whole phenomenon/person
- source for ideas
- sometimes necessary
what is the main disadvantage of the case study method?
unknown generalizability
what is the experimental method?
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
what is the correlation method?
a research technique that establishes the relationship between two variables by measuring both variables as they occur naturally in a sample of participants
