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| Chapter 6: Personality Assessment II: Personality Judgment in Daily Life |
Do you consider yourself a good judge of character? Do you think you can see right through people? Are you a good judge of personality? Wow your friends and family! See how accurate you actually can be!
Step #1: Pick a personality measurement instrument
Obtain a copy of The Big Five Inventory (BFI; see citation below). You only need to provide raters with the scale items (keep the same order as in the book chapter), and you need to give them a Likert scaling below:
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement,
and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of
personality: Theory and research (2nd ed.) (pp. 102-138). New York: Guilford Press.
Step #2: Find people willing to complete the scale
You can pick anyone to complete the scale, but it would be most informative if you choose at least two people (a close friend, and someone you have recently met—maybe a classmate you do not know very well, if at all).
The people you choose will be the target(s) and you will be the judge. Therefore, the people you choose, the target(s), will each complete the scale as a self-report measure (completing the scale about their own personality). You will be the judge, and you will complete the scale about each target as informant-report, reporting on the personality of the target (if you have more than one, rate each target, one at a time).
Step #3: Enter the data
Now you need to enter the data you collected. Probably the easiest method is to use SPSS (a statistical software program) but you probably will not have a copy of it on your computer. If you have access to SPSS, you can enter the data in that program, formatted exactly like the Excel spreadsheet (see below).
Almost everyone has a copy of Excel on their computer, or has easy access to Excel, so the following examples will pertain to entering these data in Excel. You can also download the Excel spreadsheet for data entry from this site for each measure.
Blank data entry sheet:
Completed data entry sheet:
Step #4 Calculate self-other agreement, our measure of accuracy in personality judgment
The Excel spreadsheet will calculate accuracy for you. It is simply running a correlation among the two columns in yellow, and then it runs another correlation among the two columns in green. Those are the first two "Self-Other Agreement: Overall" correlations. For the Big Five the same procedure is followed, except only the BFI items that measure those traits are used for the correlation (i.e., only the BFI extraversion items are used to calculate the correlation representing accuracy on extraversion).
Step #5 Interpret your results
For any scale:
- Negative accuracy, r <.00, is theoretically meaningless; however, you can see negative self-other agreement correlations occasionally in data; statistically speaking, negative correlations would indicate disagreement and the stronger the negative correlation the stronger the disagreement. Theoretically when psychologists discuss accuracy, those scores would theoretically range from .00 (no accuracy) to 1.0 (perfect accuracy).
For the BFI:
- Statistically significant accuracy ranges from about r = .26 to r = 1.0
- No accuracy ranges from about r = .00 (or less) to r = -.25.
In the example above Target 1 is a long-time friend of the judge, and Target 2 is someone the judge knew only from a couple of class meetings. As you can see in the example, this judge had better accuracy (self-other agreement) for Target 1 than for Target 2. This is a typical acquaintanceship effect—the longer a judge knows a target, the higher the accuracy is expected to be. Acquaintanceship effect is an example of the information moderator.
On the Big Five, for Target 1, this judge had very high accuracy extraversion and had lower accuracy for openness to experience. This is a typical pattern and is an example of the trait moderator: extraversion is a visible trait, whereas openness to experience is a less visible trait.
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