The SAPA Personality Inventory: An empirically-derived, hierarchically-organized self-report personality assessment model

122 page manuscript; 444 page total lengthThe influence of personality on important life outcomes has been widely recognized for thousands of years (Condon, 2014), and the difficulty of its measurement has been vexing for many decades (Galton, 1884; Cattell, 1945; Goldberg, 1981; Ackerman, 2018). The challenge with objective measurement stems from the need for massive amounts of data to account for dynamic interplay between variations in thousands of narrow dispositional traits (aka individual differences in behavior) and the ever-evolving contextual factors inherent to modern living. It is a prototypical “big data” problem. Despite this, dozens of ambitious social scientists have posited a diverse array of personality assessment models. Many of these are heavily imbued with theory, nearly all are focused solely on one domain of personality (e.g., very broad dispositional traits or vocational interests) to the exclusion of others (e.g., cognitive abilities, values, or less generalizable maladaptive behaviors), and most have been derived based on surprisingly small samples drawn from populations that have come to be known as "WEIRD" (Henrich et al., 2010). Simply put, there is widespread need for models that are empirically-grounded in more (and more representative) data. In this manuscript, I demonstrate that it is possible to address the shortcomings of extant theory-driven approaches by combining recent innovations from outside of personality research to empirically derive personality assessment models. This is done by administering a large pool of widely-used public domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 1999) to three large online samples (N > 125,000) using a planned missingness design (Revelle et al., 2016). While the existing "best practices" for developing personality assessment models tends towards several iterative rounds of data collection and analysis guided by theory culminating in publication of only the final product, I have endeavored to make a highly detailed record of all steps followed during the development of the SAPA Personality Inventory in order to encourage feedback regarding critical analytic decisions. This has unfortunately resulted in the production of a book-length manuscript but I hope that this transparency will serve to minimize (even if it does not eliminate) the influence of bias

An Organizational Framework for the Psychological Individual Differences: Integrating the Affective, Cognitive, and Conative Domains

299 pagesRecognition of the importance of individual differences dates back to humanity’s oldest surviving texts yet the scientific study of individual differences has been surprisingly limited. This paradox is presumed to result from the fact that differential psychology has struggled to graduate beyond pre-paradigmatic status as a science. In part, this has stemmed from the tendency to align idiographic approaches with the largely nomothetic methods of differential psychology under the broad label of “personality” research. The struggle has shifted – and, to some extent, abated – following acceptance of the Big Five taxonomy of personality and the more pressing concern has recently been the need to incorporate findings from additional disciplines of differential psychology. The purpose of this research was to propose an integrated assessment model – a preliminary paradigm which can be tested against extant and future models of individual differences in terms of predictive utility for a wide range of behaviors. The procedures used to develop this model are described separately by discipline (temperament, cognitive ability and vocational interests) and are supplemented by a methodological study regarding item clusters and complexity. All analyses were based on Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment sampling procedures and large international samples (N s ranged from 24,000 to 97,000 participants representing 170 to 199 countries). The proposed temperament scales were iteratively derived from factor analyses of the items in 8 widely-used public-domain measures and can be scored at three hierarchical levels (with 3, 5 and 15 factors). The case is made that these scales are well-suited for heterarchical assessment and that the heterarchical organization of personality constructs often reflects the manner in which personality models are used in everyday settings. The cognitive ability scales represent a validated public-domain pool of items designed to assess several types of ability in unproctored online settings. The vocational interest scales are derived from two public-domain measures and reflect the traditional six-factor interests framework. Collectively, these scales form an efficient multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary assessment model (the “SAPA Personality Inventory”) which aims to serve as a preliminary testable paradigm for differential psychology research

Diversity Management: Seeking Validation

Diversity management is widely valued in higher education today, but closer examination often reveals a lack of action to support the level of diversity that institutions claim to embrace in many of their strategic documents. This paper includes an assessment of diversity management within South Carolina’s technical colleges and an examination of survey results.  It is a companion study to a prior study of diversity in North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU).  The purpose of that research was to review campus-wide documents and structure of schools in the NCICU to determine diversity transparency (Bledsoe/Oatsvall)

The MPCP Longitudinal Educational Growth Study Third Year Report

This is the third-year report in a five-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The MPCP, which began in 1990, provides government-funded vouchers for low-income children to attend private schools in the City of Milwaukee. The maximum voucher amount in 2008-09 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used a voucher to attend either secular or religious private schools. The MPCP is the oldest and largest urban school voucher program in the United States. This evaluation was authorized by Wisconsin Act 125 enacted in 2005

Estimating ability for two samples

9 pagesUsing IRT to estimate ability is easy, but how accurate are the estimate and what about multiple samples

Frequency of use metrics for American English person descriptors: Extensions of Roivainen's internet search methodology

21 pagesPersonality traits are often measured using person-descriptive terms, but data are limited regarding the frequency of usage for these terms in everyday language. This project reports on the relative frequency of usage for a large pool of American English terms (N = 18,240) using count estimates from search engine results and in books cataloged by Google. These estimates are based on the ngrams formed when each descriptor is combined with a common person-related noun (person, woman, man, girl, boy). Results are reported for each noun form and a frequency index in an online database that can be sorted, searched, and downloaded. We report on associations among the different noun forms and data types, and propose recommendations for the use of these data in conjunction with other resources. In particular, we encourage collaborative approaches among research teams using large language models in psycholexical research related to personality structure

Heating the hot atmospheres of galaxy groups and clusters with cavities: the relationship between jet power and low-frequency radio emission

We present scaling relations between jet power and radio power measured using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), Chandra and XMM-Newton, for a sample of 9 galaxy groups combined with the Birzan et al. sample of clusters. Cavity power is used as a proxy for mechanical jet power. Radio power is measured at 235 MHz and 1.4 GHz, and the integrated 10 MHz-10 GHz radio luminosity is estimated from the GMRT 610-235 MHz spectral index. The use of consistently analysed, high resolution low-frequency radio data from a single observatory makes the radio powers for the groups more reliable than those used by previous studies, and the combined sample covers 6-7 decades in radio power and 5 decades in cavity power. We find a relation of the form Pjet proportional to Lradio^~0.7 for integrated radio luminosity, with a total scatter of sigma_Lrad=0.63 and an intrinsic scatter of sigma_i,Lrad=0.59. A similar relation is found for 235 MHz power, but a slightly flatter relation with greater scatter is found for 1.4 GHz power, suggesting that low-frequency or broad band radio measurements are superior jet power indicators. We find our low-frequency relations to be in good agreement with previous observational results. Comparison with jet models shows reasonable agreement, which may be improved if radio sources have a significant low-energy electron population. We consider possible factors which could bias our results or render them more uncertain, and find that correcting for such factors in those groups we are able to study in detail leads to a flattening of the Pjet:Lradio relation.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 7 pages, 3 figure

Selected ICAR Data from the SAPA-Project: Development and Initial Validation of a Public-Domain Measure

6 pagesThese data were collected during the initial evaluation of the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR) project. ICAR is an international collaborative effort to develop open-source public-domain tools for cognitive ability assessment, including tools that can be administered in non-proctored environments (e.g., online administration) and those which are based on automatic item generation algorithms. These data provide initial validation of the first four ICAR item types as reported in Condon & Revelle [1]. The 4 item types contain a total of 60 items: 9 Letter and Number Series items, 11 Matrix Reasoning items, 16 Verbal Reasoning items and 24 Three-dimensional Rotation items. Approximately 97,000 individuals were administered random subsets of these 60 items using the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment method between August 18, 2010 and May 20, 2013. The data are available in rdata and csv formats and are accompanied by documentation stored as a text file. Re-use potential includes a wide range of structural and item-level analyses

Climate:Weather::Traits:State

5 pagesThe target article by Baumert et al. is an ambitious attempt to combine personality structure, process and development into a coherent whole. We applaud the effort and would like to suggest an analogy that might prove useful when addressing their three questions. The analogy is the physics involved in the climate sciences. Indeed we have suggested that “personality is to emotion as climate is to weather” that is, that what we call personality traits are a long term average of behaviors and emotional reactions that can seem to have different causes than the short term fluctuations known as emotional, cognitive and behavioral states (Revelle, 2007, Revelle and Wilt, 2016).Preparation of this manuscript was funded in part by grant SMA1419324 from the National Science Foundation to William Revelle

Reliability

38 pages. The published version can be found at https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118489772.ch23Separating signal from noise is the primary challenge of measurement and is the fundamental goal of all approaches to reliability theory. Reliability is the ability to generalize about individual differences across alternative sources of variation. Generalizations within a domain of items use internal consistency estimates. This chapter examines reliability to estimate the true score given an observed score, and to establish confidence intervals around this estimate based upon the standard error of the observed scores. The concept that observed covariances reflect true covariances is the basis for structural equation modeling, in which relationships between observed scores are expressed in terms of relationships between latent scores and the reliability of the measurement of the latent variables. Reliability estimates can be found based upon variations in the overall test, variations over time, variation over items in a test, and variability associated with who is giving the test