4 Types of personality psychology research?
- Correlational Research
- Experimental Research
- Natural or Quasi-Experiments
- Moderation by Individual Differences
What is Correlational Research?
• Examines the relation between two variables
- Correlation does not equal causation
Pros/Cons of Correlational Research
Pros of Correlational Research
• Simple to collect data
• Test whether a relationship exists between two variables
Cons
• Cannot test causation
What is Experimental Research?
- Tests Cause/Effect
- Key: Random assignment to condition
- Ideal: Samples identical except for manipulated condition
What is a Repeated Measures style experiment?
Within-subject design
- A group of participants are recruited
- All members of the group experience the same conditions of the independent variable (both do condition 1 & 2)
- Compare the results for the two conditions
(but the difference in time could impact the study –> people could figure out the purpose of the study after the first condition)
What is a Independent Measures style experiment?
Between-subject design
- Where a group of participants are recruited then split into 2 groups (randomly assigned)
- Each group receives different independent variable conditions (e.g. placebo vs an actual drug)
- The dependent variable is then measured for each group and compared
How do you combat the potential unreliability that between-subject designs may have due to the two groups being different?
Have large sample sizes for both groups so both groups on average end up being similar.
What are natural experiments?
Letting nature assign participants to conditions
- e.g. we can’t assign someone a gender - nature does
or we can’t make someone cut their hand off if we wanna study 1 handed people
Why are natural experiments not the gold standard but normal experiments are (when we assign the participants randomly to groups)
There’s always a 3rd kind of variable explanation for natural experiments (confound)
• Hence Experiments—Gold standard
• Natural Experiments, Correlations
- Possible alternative explanations
Because people who lets say have 1 hand due to some accident –> may have had that happen due to some confounding factor that could impact the study’s validity
What is the purpose of a pretest (occurs before group assignment)?
Helps us establish whether there is some underlying difference that may account for our results. If no such confound is found then we can confidently say that the results where due to our independent variables.
Why not run experiments on just individuals?
Can’t generalise to the population
What is a moderation analysis?
A moderator analysis is used to determine whether the relationship between two variables depends on (is moderated by) the value of a third variable
What are Projective Tests?
Perceptions of what we see in things such as ink blots are recorded and then analyzed to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.
What are Objective Tests?
- Questionnaires using yes/no or scales
- “Do you like cats?”
- “I am a dog person” (Strongly disagree to Strongly agree)
What is the Rational Method?
Purposely designing a questionnaire to target a specific psychological construct.
• Choose face valid items - clearly aimed at measuring a particular thing
e.g. Intentional harm: Did you intentionally harm him?
What is the Rational Method?
Purposely designing a questionnaire to target a specific psychological construct.
• Choose face valid items - clearly aimed at measuring a particular thing
e.g. Intentional harm: Did you intentionally harm him?
e. g. • Need for cognition scale:
- I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation that requires a lot of thinking.
- Thinking is not my idea of fun.* (reverse coded) – to avoid response bias –> people who tend to agree to everything
What must be done for the Rational Method to be valid?
- Test to ensure otherwise valid, reliable, generalizable
- Different samples (external validity)
- Over time (reliable)
What is the Factor Analytic Method?
No preset target of measurement (No a priori theoretical structure)
- Big 5 personality was based of this method
- Simply collects data from a bunch of questions (e.g. do you like pizza? do you like reading?)
- Then sees what clusters together and what doesn’t
- -> extract the meaning from the data
What is Operationalization?
The way a study measures a psychological
process
- E.g. Big 5 personality inventory as measure of traits
- E.g. number of chili peppers given as measure of aggression
What is a issue with Operationalization?
To ask why behaviour occurred requires Inference:
- Psychology and personality cannot be directly observed
- We must infer processes from other observations
- and these inferences are always debatable
e. g. Ice bucket measure of pain tolerance or self-control?
What is the validity of a measure?
Does it measure what it claims to measure?
What is the Reliability of a measure?
Does the measure consistently tap into what you want to measure?
What is the Generalizability of a measure?
Do the results of your study generalize outside the study?
- Generalizability to other populations
- Generalizability to other procedures?
- Generalizability to other situations?
What was found in the Hallway study?
Northerners were much less likely to display reactive aggressive behaviour than Southerners when bumped into and called “asshole” by a research assistant.
