Assessing Personality States: What to Consider when Constructing Personality State Measures

By K. Horstmann, Matthias Ziegler. European Journal of Personality, 2020

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Repeated assessments of personality states in daily diary or experience sampling studies have become a more and more common tool in the psychologist's toolbox. However, and contrary to the widely available literature on personality traits, no best practices for the development of personality state measures exist, and personality state measures have been developed in many different ways. To address this, we first define what a personality state is and discuss important components. On the basis of this, we define what a personality state measure is and suggest a general guideline for the development of such measures. Following the ABC of test construction can then guide the strategy for obtaining validity and reliability evidence: (A) What is the construct being measured? (B) What is the intended purpose of the measure? And (C) What is the targeted population of persons and situations? We then conclude with an example by developing an initial item pool for the assessment of conscientiousness personality states. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/772ae52aee8ead257dc20e33da0751a578f0a61b

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Citations in the corpus

Descriptive, Predictive and Explanatory Personality Research: Different Goals, Different Approaches, but a Shared Need to Move beyond the Big Few Traits (2020, background): “…model is often used in individual differences research may not be a good idea, just as assuming that narrower traits such as facets or nuances are somehow more contextual-situational and thereby more appropriate candidates for personality states may be ill-conceived (Horstmann & Ziegler, 2020).”
Personality trait stability and change (2021, background): “We know little about the suitability of these measures for capturing the structure of intra individual changes, or to measure personality processes (Horstmann & Ziegler, 2020).”