Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-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 languageEnglish
JournalPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Volume2023
Early online date22 Nov 2023
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 22 Nov 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Mendeley e8acaaa0-5a15-33af-8888-6ff48250a6bc
ORCID /0000-0003-0915-0809/work/150329856

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • emotions, measurement, neuroticism, personality, variability

Library keywords