Chapter Two

Question 1

self-report data (S-data)

Answer 1

information somebody reveals about themselves or others

Question 2

unstructured (open-ended) self-report

Answer 2

twenty statements “i am _____” questionnaire

Question 3

structured (forced-choice)

Answer 3

likert-type scale; indicates participants to answer a degree (number) to how much a trait characterizes them

Question 4

experience sampling

Answer 4

people answer questions (such as about moods or physical symptoms throughout the day) every day at random times for several weeks or longer

Question 5

observer-report data (O-data)

Answer 5

information gathered about our personalities from observing sources (parent, friend, teacher, etc.)

Question 6

naturalistic observation

Answer 6

observers recording events that occur in the normal course of the lives of participants

Question 7

artificial observation

Answer 7

when experimenters instruct participants to perform a task and observe how individuals behave in these constructed settings

Question 8

test-data (T-data)

Answer 8

when participants are placed in a standardized testing situation to see if different people react differently to an identical situation

Question 9

life-outcome data

Answer 9

the information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny

Question 10

triangulation

Answer 10

to examine results that transcend data sources (if results are the same for self-report data and a following observer-report data)

Question 11

test-retest reliability

Answer 11

repeated measurement; whether a test produces similar results when repeated with the same participants under similar conditions

Question 12

internal consistent reliability

Answer 12

examining the relationships among items themselves at a single point in time, and the items all correlate well with eachother

Question 13

inter-rater reliability

Answer 13

when obtaining measurements from multiple observers and they all agree

Question 14

response sets

Answer 14

refer to the tendency of some people to respond to the questions with answers unrelated to the question content

Question 15

socially desirable responses

Answer 15

the tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable

Question 16

face validity

Answer 16

on the surface, a test measures what it’s supposed to measure

Question 17

predictive validity

Answer 17

whether a test predicts criteria external to the test

Question 18

convergent validity

Answer 18

whether a test correlates with other measures that it should correlate with

Question 19

discriminant validity

Answer 19

what a measure should not correlate with

Question 20

construct validity

Answer 20

a test measures what it claims to measure, correlates with what it’s supposed to, and is not correlated with what it shouldn’t correlate with

Question 21

generalizability

Answer 21

the degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts

Question 22

experimental methods

Answer 22

typically used to determine causality — to find out whether one variable influences another variable

Question 23

random assignment

Answer 23

of participants, a procedure that helps ensure all groups are the same at the beginning of a study

Question 24

counterbalancing

Answer 24

obtaining equivalence by counterbalancing the order of conditions

Question 25

correlational studies

Answer 25

statistical procedures used for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables

Question 26

act nomination

Answer 26

a procedure designed to identify which acts belong to which trait categories

Question 27

prototypicality judgement

Answer 27

involves identifying which acts are more central to, or prototypical of, each trait category

Question 28

the recording of act performance

Answer 28

securing information on the actual performance of individuals in their daily lives

Question 29

the lexical approach

Answer 29

starts with the lexical hypothesis; all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language

Question 30

synonym frequency

Answer 30

if an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it but more, then it is a more important dimension of individual difference

Question 31

cross-cultural universality

Answer 31

if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures in which its members have codified terms to describe the trait, then the trait must be universally important in human affairs

Question 32

statistical approach

Answer 32

numerically groups together like minded items aka a pool of personality items

Question 33

factor analysis

Answer 33

identifies groups of items that covary, but tend not to covary with other groups of items

Question 34

theoretical approach

Answer 34

starts with a theory that determines which variables are important