Assessing meaningful within-person variability in Likert-scale rated personality descriptions: An IRT tree approach.

Abstract

Personality researchers and clinical psychologists have long been interested in within-person 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 (a) true differences in trait level; and (b) 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 item-response theory (IRT) on the basis of Böckenholt's (2012) three-process 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 within-person 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.