Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Within-person variability in affect (e.g., Neuroticism) and personality have been linked to well-being. These are measured either by asking people to report how variable they are or to give multiple reports on the construct and calculating a within-person standard deviation adjusted for confounding by the person-level mean. The two measures are weakly correlated with one another and the links of variability with well-being depend on which measure researchers use. Recent research suggests that people’s repeated ratings may be biased by response styles. In a 7-day study (N = 399) with up to five measurements per day, we confirmed that the measures of variability lacked sufficient convergent validity to be used interchangeably. We found only 1 significant correlation (of 10) between variability in repeated ratings of affect or personality and variability in repeated ratings of a theoretically unrelated construct (i.e., features of images). There was very little evidence supporting the response styles hypothesis.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1078-1094 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 22 Nov 2023 |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
| Mendeley | e8acaaa0-5a15-33af-8888-6ff48250a6bc |
|---|---|
| ORCID | /0000-0003-0915-0809/work/150329856 |
| PubMed | 37991205 |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- emotions, measurement, neuroticism, personality, variability