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
Pages (from-to)1078-1094
Number of pages17
JournalPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Volume51
Issue number6
Early online date22 Nov 2023
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

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

Library keywords