Methods in the Study of Personality Discussion Project
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Methods in the Study of Personality Discussion Project
“What kind of dumb question is that? It’s obvious. That’s what I’d do.”
“Huh. I know guys whose hometown girls dumped them, and none of them did that. It was exactly the oppo- site. They laid around moping. I don’t think you know any- thing about how people react to breakups.”
thread of continuity. From this you might even start to form a theory—a set of ideas to explain your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Looking at your own experience is an easy beginning, but it has a problem. Specifically, your consciousness has a special relationship to your memories because they’re yours. It’s hard to be sure this special relationship doesn’t distort what you’re seeing. For instance, you can misremember something you experienced, yet feel sure your memory is correct.
This problem goes away when you look at someone else instead of yourself (like Dave in the opening example). That’s the second method of gathering information: Observe someone else. This method also has a problem, though—the opposite of introspection’s problem. Specifi- cally, it’s impossible to be “inside another person’s head,” to really know what that person is thinking and feeling. This difference in perspective can create vast differences in understanding. It can also lead to misinterpretation. Which is better? Each has a place in the search for truth. Neither is perfect, but they sometimes can be used to complement one another.
2.1.2: Depth Through Case Studies These two starting points lead in several directions. Per- sonality psychologists sometimes try to understand an entire person at once, rather than just part of the person.
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prompting the person to stop and report on some aspect of his or her current experience. The prompt often is in the form of a signal from a cell phone. Sometimes these studies are very intensive, with reports made several times a day. Some- times they are less so (e.g., morning and evening reports).
An important advantage of experience sampling methods is that they don’t require the person to think back very far in time (maybe a half-day, maybe only an hour or so, maybe not at all). This yields less distortion in recall of what the experiences actually were. Unfortunately, people often don’t do a very good job of remembering details of an event many hours later (Kamarck, Muldoon, Shiffman, & Sutton-Tyrrell, 2007; Stone, Kennedy-Moore, & Neale, 1995). Experience sampling methods let you get the events more “on line” than other methods.
Experience sampling shares with case studies the fact that it gets a lot of information about each person being stud- ied. In both cases, it’s possible to search within this informa- tion for patterns within a given person across many situations and points in time. This is referred to as an idiographic method (Conner, Tennen, Fleeson, & Barrett, 2009; Molenaar & Campbell, 2009), because the focus is on the individual. (The word idiographic has the same source as idiosyncratic.)
2.1.4: Seeking Generality by Studying Many People Case studies can provide insights about life. They provide useful information for researchers and often are an impor- tant source of ideas. But case studies aren’t the main source of information about personality today. In large part, this is because a case study, no matter how good, has an important
Henry Murray (1938), who emphasized the need to study the person as a coherent entity, coined the term personol- ogy to refer to that effort.
This view led to a technique called the case study. A case study is an in-depth study of one person, usually a long period of observation and typically some unstruc- tured interviews. Sometimes, it involves spending a day or two being around the person to see how he or she interacts with others. Repeated observations let the observer con- firm initial impressions or correct wrong ones. Confirming or disconfirming an impression can’t happen if you make only one observation. The depth of probing in a case study can reveal detail that otherwise wouldn’t be apparent. This, in turn, can yield insights.
Case studies are rich in detail and can create vivid descriptions of the people under study. Particularly compel- ling incidents or examples may illustrate broader themes in the person’s life. Because case studies see the person in his or her life situation instead of settings created by the researcher, the information pertains to normal life. Because they’re open ended, the observer can follow whatever leads seem interest- ing, not just ask questions chosen ahead of time.
2.1.3: Depth from Experience Sampling Another kind of depth is provided by what are called experi- ence sampling studies, or diary studies (Kamarck, Shiffman, & Wethington, 2011; Laurenceau & Bolger, 2005; Smyth & Heron, 2013). These studies are also conducted across long- ish periods of time, like case studies. Instead of an external observer, though, experience sampling involves repeatedly
The generality of a conclusion can be established only by studying a mix of people from different backgrounds.
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along which there are at least two values or levels, although some variables have an infinite number of values. For example, sex is a variable with values of male and female. Self-esteem is a variable that has a virtually limitless num- ber of values (from very low to very high) as you make smaller discriminations among people.
It’s important to distinguish between a variable and its values. Conclusions about relationships always involve the whole dimension, not just one end of it. Thus, researchers always study at least two levels of the variable they’re interested in. You can’t understand the effects of low self- esteem by looking only at people with low self-esteem. If there’s a relationship between self-esteem and academic performance, for example, the only way to find it out is to look at people with different levels of self-esteem (see Figure 2.1). If there’s a relationship, people with low self- esteem should have low grades and people with higher self-esteem should have higher grades.
problem: It deals with just one person. When you’re forming theories or drawing conclusions, you want them to apply to many people—if possible, to all people.
How widely a conclusion can be applied is called its generality or its generalizability. For a conclusion to be generalizable, it must be based on many people, not one or two. The more people studied, the more convinced you can be that what you see is true of people in general, instead of only a few people. In most research on personality, researchers look at tens—even hundreds—of people to increase the generality of their conclusions.
To truly ensure generality, researchers should study people of many ages and from all walks of life—indeed, from all cultures. For various reasons, this isn’t always done, though it’s becoming more common. As a matter of convenience, a lot of research on personality is done on col- lege students. Do college students provide a good picture of what’s important in personality? Maybe yes, maybe no. College students differ from older people in several ways. For one, they have a sense of self that may be more rapidly changing. This may affect the findings. It’s not really clear how different college students are from everyone else. It does seem clear, though, that we should be cautious in assuming that conclusions drawn from research on college students always apply to “people in general.”
Most observations on personality also come from the United States and western Europe. Most research is done with middle- to upper-middle-class people. Some of it uses only one sex. We must be careful not to assume that conclu- sions from such studies apply to people from other cultures, other socioeconomic groups, and (sometimes) both sexes.
Generalizability, then, is a continuum. Rarely does any study range broadly enough to ensure total generalizabil- ity. Some are better than others. How far a conclusion can be generalized is an issue that must always be kept in mind in evaluating research results.
The desire for generality and the desire for in-depth understanding of a person are competing pressures. They force a trade-off. That is, given the same investment of time and energy, you can know a great deal about one person (or a very few people), or you can know a little bit about a much larger number of people. It’s nearly impossible to do both at once. As a result, researchers tend to choose one path or the other, according to which pressure they find more important.
2.2: Establishing Relationships among Variables 2.2 Examine the process of establishing two kinds of
relationships between variables
Insights from introspection or observation suggest relationships between variables. A variable is a dimension
Variable Average self-esteem ?
Moderately high self-esteem ?
Very high self-esteem ?
Moderately low self-esteem ?
Very low self-esteem Low GPA
Figure 2.1 Whether a relationship exists between variables can be deter- mined only by looking at more than one value on each variable. For instance, knowing that people low in self-esteem have poor academic performances leaves open the question of whether everyone else’s performances are just as poor. This question is critically important in establishing a relationship between the two variables.
The last part of that statement is just as important as the first part. Knowing that people low in self-esteem have low grades tells you nothing, if people high in self-esteem also have low grades. It can be hard to keep this in mind. In fact, people often fail to realize how important this issue is. If you don’t keep it in mind, though, you can draw seri- ously wrong conclusions (for illustrations, see Chapman, 1967; Crocker, 1981).
The need to examine people who form a range of lev- els of a given variable is a second reason why it’s impor- tant to go beyond case studies (the issue of generality was the first one). The need to examine a range of variability underlies several research methods.
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