Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
1-2019
Abstract
Personality researchers and clinical psychologists have long been interested in withinperson variability in a given personality trait. Two critical methodological challenges that stymie current research on within-person variability are separating meaningful within-person variability from 1) true differences in trait level and 2) careless responding (or person unreliability). To partly avoid these issues, personality researchers commonly only study within-person variability in personality states over time using the standard deviation (SD) across repeated measurements of the same items (typically across days)—a relatively resource-intensive approach. In this article, we detail an approach that allows researchers to measure another type of within-person variability. The described approach utilizes IRT on the basis of Böckenholt’s (2012) threeprocess model, and extracts a meaningful variability score from Likert-ratings of personality descriptions that is distinct from directional (trait) responding. Two studies (N = 577; N = 120- 235) suggest that IRT variability generalizes across traits, has high split-half reliability, is not highly correlated with established indices of IRT person unreliability for directional trait responding, and correlates with within-person SDs from personality inventories and withinperson SDs in a diary study with repeated measurements across days 20 months later. The implications and usefulness of IRT variability from personality descriptions as a conceptually clarified, efficient, and feasible assessment of within-person variability in personality ratings are discussed.
Keywords
Variability, flux, adaptability, psychometrics, tree models
Discipline
Psychology
Research Areas
Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources
Publication
Psychological Assessment
Volume
31
Issue
4
First Page
474
Last Page
487
ISSN
1040-3590
Identifier
10.1037/pas0000600
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Citation
LANG, Jonas W. B.; LIEVENS, Filip; DE FRUYT, Filip; ZETTLER, Ingo; and TACKETT, Jennifer L..
Assessing meaningful within-person variability in Likert-scale rated personality descriptions: An IRT tree approach. (2019). Psychological Assessment. 31, (4), 474-487.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6424
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000600