Some recent trends in personality assessment

Personality‐descriptive verbs

This article describes the derivation of a taxonomy of personality‐descriptive verbs. In the introduction the verb domain is delineated relative to other domains of the language of personality. It is argued that verbs are theoretically useful in bridging the gap between trait language and act language. The aim is to provide a representative and effective instrument for registering judgements on personality. In a first study the steps are described that were followed to arrive at a list of personality‐descriptive verbs. Both the present authors and layjudges (n=22) took part in this. Five hundred and forty‐three verbs resulted from this study. Study 2 (n=200) describes the determination of the internal structure of the domain of verbs through factor analysis of both self‐ and partner‐ratings. By applying a method of rotation to perfectly congruent weights the verb‐structure turned out to be invariant under the self‐ and partner‐conditions. The last part of the study investigates the relationship between personality‐descriptive verbs and adjectives. Regressions of verb‐ratings on the adjective‐ratings and of adjective‐ratings on the verb‐ratings were calculated and factor analyses were performed on the residual matrices. The results show the existence of additional verb‐dimensions above those already established in the adjective domain.

Which factors are related to Finnish home care workers' job satisfaction, stress, psychological distress and perceived quality of care? - a mixed method study

BACKGROUND

The desire to increase the role of home care in Finland has created problems in home care work. Working conditions have deteriorated, the quality of care experienced is low, and staff members suffer from time pressure and stress, amongst other things. The aim of this article is to explore the challenges, stressors, teamwork and management factors that are associated with home care staff members' well-being, job satisfaction and experienced care quality, and further, how staff members experience their work.

METHODS

A survey was sent to home care workers in two case organizations that participated in the study. In addition, semi-structured theme interviews with home care workers were conducted. The data from the survey was analysed using analysis of covariance, and interview data was analysed using the Grounded Theory-based method from Gioia et al. RESULTS: Respondents of the survey and the interview participants were mainly female practical nurses. The results from the survey showed, for example, that time pressure was associated with higher stress and psychological distress, and interruptions were associated with lower job satisfaction and higher stress. In addition, variables related to teamwork, such as participative safety, were shown to explain the variation in quality of care. The analysis of the interview data further brought up dissatisfaction with management practices, which seems to have led to a decrease in job satisfaction. Exhaustion and strain were present among staff members, which originated from an insufficient number of carers.

CONCLUSIONS

Current working conditions and work practices in Finnish home care are experienced stressful. The results from this study indicate that having more autonomy at work was associated with job satisfaction, according to both analyses. Team climate and idea implementation were related to quality of care. Therefore, increasing self-organizing team practices might be a possible development method for improving working conditions and staff members' well-being. Implementing self-organizing team practices could possibly also attract employees to work in home care and prevent turnover.

Self-Organizing Teams in Elderly Care in Finland: Experiences and Opportunities

Health and social care for older people in Finland is increasingly provided in people's homes, leading to large caseloads of high-dependency patients for providers of home care, whose working conditions have deteriorated. Buurtzorg, a model of home care in the Netherlands that empowers caregivers to organize their own work processes, has shown promising results in terms of effectiveness and satisfaction of clients and caregivers. This article aims to provide insights about the challenges and effects of implementing self-organizing teams in three Finnish public health and social care organizations.

Self-Efficacy and Cognitive Performance in High-Functioning Older Individuals

The hypothesis that stronger self-efficacy beliefs are associated with better cognitive performance at older ages was examined in a sample of men and women, age 70-79. Multiple domains of efficacy beliefs and cognitive abilities were examined. Analyses revealed considerable specificity in the observed associations. For men, multiple regression analyses revealed that instrumental efficacy beliefs were related to better performance on tests of memory and abstraction, independent of sociodemographic characteristics and physical and psychological health; there were no independent associations with individual tests of spatial ability naming, incidental recall, or delayed spatial recognition. For women, instrumental efficacy beliefs had no significant associations with the tests of cognitive ability. Interpersonal efficacy beliefs showed no significant associations for men or women. Possible reasons for these gender differences as well as the specificity of the instrumental efficacy associations are discussed.

Trait anxiety and trait anger measured by ecological momentary assessment and their correspondence with traditional trait questionnaires

Ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of anxiety and anger/hostility were obtained every 25-30 minutes over two 24-hour periods, separated by a median of 6 months, from 165 employees at a university in the Northeast. We used a multilevel trait-state-error structural equation model to estimate: (1) the proportion of variance in EMA anxiety and anger/hostility attributable to stable trait-like individual differences; (2) the correspondence between these trait-like components of EMA anxiety and anger/hostility and traditional questionnaire measures of each construct; and (3) the test-retest correlation between two 24-hour averages obtained several months apart. After adjustment for measurement error, more than half the total variance in EMA reports of anxiety and anger/hostility is attributable to stable trait-like individual differences; however, the trait-like component of each construct is only modestly correlated with questionnaire measures of that construct. The 6-month "test-retest" correlations of latent variables representing the true 24-hour EMA average anxiety and average anger are quite high (r ≥ 0.83). This study represents the longest follow-up period over which EMA-based estimates of traits have been examined. The results suggest that although the trait component (individual differences) of EMA momentary ratings of anxiety and anger is larger than the state component, traditional self-report questionnaires of trait anxiety and anger correspond only weakly with EMA-defined traits.

The Abbreviation of Personality, or how to Measure 200 Personality Scales with 200 Items

Personality researchers have recently advocated the use of very short personality inventories in order to minimize administration time. However, few such inventories are currently available. Here I introduce an automated method that can be used to abbreviate virtually any personality inventory with minimal effort. After validating the method against existing measures in Studies 1 and 2, a new 181-item inventory is generated in Study 3 that accurately recaptures scores on 8 different broadband inventories comprising 203 distinct scales. Collectively, the results validate a powerful new way to improve the efficiency of personality measurement in research settings.

The Physics and Chemistry of Personality

Physics and chemistry, two basic natural sciences, are today seamlessly integrated, but for much of their history they were separate enterprises with distinct methods and goals. Physicists have consistently sought simplicity and mathematical rigor, whereas chemists seem to have been fascinated by the challenges of complexity. Parallels between these two sciences and the two major branches of contemporary personality psychology are described in an attempt to put in perspective the daunting enterprise of constructing a unified science of human nature.

Predictors of health-related quality of life perspectives, self-esteem, and life satisfactions of older adults following spousal loss: an 18-month follow-up study of widows and widowers

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The overall purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between widowed persons' baseline assessments of self-efficacy beliefs and their ratings of perceived health-related quality of life, life satisfactions, and self-esteem obtained in an 18-month follow-up.

DESIGN AND METHOD

At Time 1, a survey of sociodemographics, a multidimensional measure of global self-efficacy, and a domain-specific measure of self-efficacy, having eight subscales of self-efficacy (interpersonal, instrumental, emotional, social support, nutritional, physical, financial, and spiritual) were administered to a group of 231 widows and widowers to obtain baseline assessments of their self-efficacy beliefs. At Time 2, a follow-up of 211 widows and widowers was conducted to obtain their perceptions of health-related quality of life, life satisfactions, and levels of self-esteem 24 months following spousal loss and to assess whether self-efficacy beliefs play a predictive role in widowed individuals' perceptions of their health-related quality of life, life satisfactions, and self-esteem.

RESULTS

A series of gender-specific multiple regression analyses models revealed that widows and widowers differ significantly with respect to the relationship between specific domains of self-efficacy and their perceived quality of life in the longer term following spousal loss.

IMPLICATIONS

Implications of the findings are discussed for clinicians and health professionals working with bereaved spouses in terms of intervention programs for retraining of self-efficacy.

Correcting Correlations of Personality Scales for Spurious Effects of Shared Items

Budescu and Rodgers (1981) noted that zero-order correlations of scales which have items in common have spurious components due to the overlapping elements. They proposed a method of adjusting these correlations, to eliminate the spurious component, and applied this method to correct the normative zero-order correlations of the nine original Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) clinical scales. This article draws attention to the fact that Budescu and Rodgers' reliability-corrected formulae were derived under an assumption which is rarely tenable in the context of personality measurement; namely, that scores on two overlapping scales can be viewed (for purposes of the derivation) as sums of standardized scores of subsets of shared items, and of subsets of items uniquely present in each scale. The assumption generally implies new scales that are not linearly related to the original personality scales, and results in reliability-corrected correlations that are not relevant to the original scales. In particular, the assumption cannot be justified with respect to MMPI scales. Reliability-corrected formulae are derived which do not make this assumption. These formulae are equivalent to explicitly defined or implied special cases of Bashaw and Anderson's (1967) "General Linear Case" formula.

The next generation of moderator research in personality psychology

The concept of a moderator variable has a long and checkered history in personality psychology. In this article I review the methodological and conceptual advances in recent moderator variable research. I then report the results of a number of empirical analyses of three newly proposed idiographic moderator variables: scalability, metatraits, and construct similarity, as well as the ipsatized variance index. The results of these analyses indicate that moderator effect sizes in personality can be expected to correspond to a correlation of about .10. I then consider two recent prescriptions, (a) aggregating trait-specific moderators into general ones, and (b) evaluating joint (e.g., triple interaction) moderator effects. Following these prescriptions did not increase the size of the moderator effects in these data. I conclude that moderator effects in personality will be small, and will thus be most reliably detected in very large samples with predictors that are strongly related to the criteria. Even small moderator effects can be important and interesting in the context of theory disconfirmation. However, moderator variables generally will not serve to transform weak relations among personality variables into strong ones.

Toward a biologically informed psychology of personality

This article describes nine ways in which biological approaches can inform issues of central and long-standing concern to personality psychologists. These include: (a) developing an adequate description of human nature, (b) providing several solutions to the puzzle of within-species genetic variability, (c) identifying the most important ways in which individuals differ, (d) giving precision to the concepts of adaptation and adjustment, (e) identifying the origins of personality dispositions, (f) providing insight into personality development and the life course, (g) providing conceptual and evidential standards for invoking personality types as opposed to personality dimensions, (h) addressing the psychophysiology of personality, and (i) focusing attention on psychological mechanisms as evolved dispositional strategies.

Rorschachbound: a 50-year memoir

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Personality Assessment evokes memories of years past when I participated in its birth. Therefore, in recording what I consider significant events in Rorschach's stormy history, I am placing them within an autobiographical framework. Originally introduced into America by David Levy in the early 1920s, the Rorschach attracted students from many disciplines who revolted against the "trait" psychology that pervaded the psychological scene at the time. For 30 years, we accepted Rorschach enthusiastically as a global method that could study the human personality as a whole and in depth. In the late 1960s, we were challenged because of repeated failures in validating research. Interest declined in its development and application. Since 1970, however, it has emerged with more strength and vigor on firmer theoretical foundations and sounder methodology. Although the method is one of the most frequently required, requested, needed, recommended, and used in many clinical settings, it is still challenged today, chiefly because of overemphasis on the nomothetic approaches in research and failure to consider interactions between personality dynamics, behavior, and situational and sociocultural variables. Those of us whose lives have long been entwined with the history of the Rorschach should step back from the contemporary canvas and contemplate the future of our method, t suggest that we develop alternative conceptual models and greater diversity of research methods and modes of thought. The Journal of Personality Assessment can enhance the future of the Rorschach by giving greater prominence to clinically oriented research, notably to the idiographic and interactional aspects of the method. In so doing, the journal can help the Rorschach reach its real goal of complete scientific validity.

The 16 PF and CPI: a comparison

This study assessed the cross-inventory generalizability of personality characterizations for Cattell's 16 PF and Gough's CPI. The univariate and multivariate relationships of these scales to their measures of impression management and general aptitude also were explored. Although many PF and CPI content scales and highly similar descriptions, all were found to have poor and inconsistent cross-inventory convergences. The 16 PF and CPI correlates of the desirability scales were found to be similar and consistent with prior research, although the number and magnitude of those for some CPI scales seemed somewhat inappropriate (as were some between the CPI and general aptitude). The relationships of the desirability scales to the content scales of each inventory were found to be heavily dependent upon rotation after factor analysis. It was concluded that the high degree of scale dissimilarity between the 16 PF and CPI must caution against clinical and research generalization across these two inventories. In addition, further investigation of these current impression management scales seems worth pursuing because they appeared to represent the most consistent characteristics measured.