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The Scientific Study of Personality
 

Assigned reading from the text : Cloninger. Pages 1-17.

Sample Essay Question : Describe how you would develop a measure to assess people who are generally happy. Propose a sample measure and describe how you would determine if it were reliable and valid.
 

A. Defining personality from a the perspective of the research psychologist:.
        Text: Personality is the psychological functioning of the individual person.

         Alternative definition : Personality is the study of how people differ from one another in terms of overt behavior and in terms of the reasons for their behavior.
 

B. Approaches to understanding personality:

        1. Clinical. Includes psychoanalytic, cognitive and humanistic traditions. Relies on personal observations, case studies, and some research with clinical populations.
        2. Practical/Applied. Determining qualities needed for particular jobs. Relies on standardized personality scales.
        3. Academic. Study of normal people and how they function.
 

C. How do academic psychologists study personality?

        1. Forming hypotheses. What about the person causes him or her to act the way he or she does? Must be testable and based on theory.
        2. Testing the hypothesis. Gathering data about the personality characteristic of interest and testing the proposed relationships. Seeing if there is a "significant difference". Study can be experimental or correlational [see discussion of Cronbach's "Two disciplines" in the text]
        3. Interpreting the findings. Complex process.

 
D. Measurement of personality characteristics.

        1. Can be done at the individual or group level.
        2. Typically involves administering some type of questionnaire.
        3. Personality scales must be reliable and valid.
 

E. Development of a personality scale.

        1. Develop a set of items measuring the construct based on theory or intuition
        2. Administer the items to lots of people. Determine which of the individual items are reliable and eliminate those that are not.
        3. Write additional items if needed and repeat #2.
        4. Make sure the measure is valid
        5. Develop standardized procedures for administering the measure.

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