Ortner / van de Vijver Behavior-Based Assessment in Psychology

Going Beyond Self-Report in the Personality, Affective, Motivation, and Social Domains
1., 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61676-437-1
Verlag: Hogrefe Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 234 Seiten

Reihe: Psychological Assessment - Science and Practice

Traditional self-reports can be an unsufficiant source of information about personality, attitudes, affect, and motivation. What are the alternatives?
This first volume in the authoritative series Psychological Assessment – Science and Practice discusses the most influential, state-of-the-art forms of assessment that can take us beyond self-report. Leading scholars from various countries describe the theoretical background and psychometric properties of alternatives to self-report, including behavior-based assessment, observational methods, innovative computerized procedures, indirect assessments, projective techniques, and narrative reports. They also look at the validity and practical application of such forms of assessment in domains as diverse as health, forensic, clinical, and consumer psychology.

Zielgruppe

For Psychology students, practitioners and researchers from all areas
concerned with assessment.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ortner, Tuulia

Ortner, Tuulia M

van de Vijver, Fons J.R.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Differentielle Psychologie, Persönlichkeitspsychologie Psychologische Diagnostik, Testpsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Behavior-Based Assessment in Psychology;1
1.1;Table of Contents;6
2;Chapter 1: Assessment Beyond Self-Reports;10
3;Chapter 2: Implicit Association Tests, Then and Now;22
4;Chapter 3: A Model of Moderated Convergence Between Direct, Indirect, and Behavioral Measures of Personality Traits;36
5;Chapter 4: Narrative Content Coding;52
6;Chapter 5: Beyond Projection – Performance-Based Assessment;71
7;Chapter 6: Measuring Implicit Motives;88
8;Chapter 7: Measures of Affect;104
9;Chapter 8: Implicit Measures of Attitudes;120
10;Chapter 9: Objective Personality Tests;140
11;Chapter 10: Indirect Measures in the Domain of Health Psychology;160
12;Chapter 11: Indirect Measures in Forensic Contexts;180
13;Chapter 12: Implicit Measures in Consumer Psychology;202
14;Chapter 13: Observation of Intra- and Interpersonal Processes;218
15;Contributors;228
16;Subject Index;231

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Assessment Beyond Self-Reports

Tuulia M. Ortner1 and Fons J. R. van de Vijver2
1Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Austria
2Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Self-reports have come under renewed scrutiny in the last few decades. Notably in social psychology, but spreading out to differential psychology, psychological assessment, and a number of applied fields of psychology, there is a tendency to refrain from using self-reports to collect data. This has led to a renewed interest in alternative modes of assessment. Objective measures or behavior-based measures are an example of such a method in which there is more interest than ever before, even though they have a long tradition, as shown here. This book provides an overview of the current state of the art in this field of assessment. In this introductory chapter we first give a short historical overview of the field, including a delineation of what we mean by assessment beyond self-reports. We then proceed by briefly describing the theme of each chapter. We conclude the chapter by drawing conclusions about the state of the field and its outlook.

A Short Look Back Into History

In the history of psychological assessment, behavior-based approaches for the measurement of personality characteristics and related constructs have played a major role from the very beginning. Early ancestors of personality psychology saw the relevance of behavioral indicators; examples are James McKeen Cattell, who in 1890 proposed behavioral tasks in his battery of mental tests, and Francis Galton, who in 1884 stated that the measurement of aspects of character deserves carefully recorded acts. Later, leading scholars of human personality also included behavioral data into their research. For example, Raymond Bernard Cattell and his team proposed three sources of information in their integral assessment of personality including so-called T-data (referring to reactions to standardized experimental situations, besides L-data and Q-data, which involve everyday behaviors and self-reported questionnaire data, respectively) represented in measurement by so-called cursive miniature situations (Cattell, 1941,1944), later called objective tests. These tests aimed to stimulate the behavioral expression of personality while meeting common psychometric standards of psychological tests. Further earlier approaches of behavior-based assessment could be traced back to the early attempts of Herrmann Rorschach and his idea to interpret reactions to a set of ambiguous stimuli to refine clinical diagnoses by tapping into not explicitly verbalized aspects of personality (Rorschach, 1921).

Nowadays, the available behavior-based approaches for the measurement of personality, motivational variables, or constructs addressing aspects related to social behavior represent an impressive variety of methods. This variety precludes a clear definition. Therefore, we refer to these as measurement approaches beyond self-reports. Such approaches beyond self-reports include the basic form of behavior observation and coding methods (e.g., index systems, category systems) that were found to be especially useful in the assessment and investigation of interactions (e.g., Hill, Maskowitz, Danis, & Wakschlag, 2008; Reyna, Brown, Pickler, Myers, & Younger, 2012), personality in children and adolescents (Kilgus, Riley-Tillman, Chafouleas, Christ, & Welsh, 2014; Martin-Storey, Serbin, Stack, & Schwartzman, 2009), and in the context of work and aptitude testing (Hennessy, Maybe, & Warr, 1998; Schollaert & Lievens, 2012). Measures beyond self-reports may also include analyses of the consequences of persons’ behavior, such as the investigation of the abrasion of the floor in a museum in order to analyze visitors’ preferences (unobtrusive measures; Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest, 1966), or analyses of personal marks on the Internet, such as information given or activities conducted in social networks (Back et al., 2010). Also narratives, spoken or written statements or stories, represent written or recorded behavior and may serve as a source for personality assessment, using structured methods of content coding (Fiese & Spagnola, 2005; Kuefner, Back, Nestler, & Egloff, 2010). Furthermore, the use of psychophysiological measures as indicators of physiological arousal (e.g., Gannon, Beech, & Ward, 2008; Madsen, Parsons, & Grubin, 2004) or facial expressions as indicators of emotions (polygraph; Tracy, Robins, & Schriber, 2009; Vick, Waller, Parr, Pasqualini, & Bard, 2007) would fall into this category. Measurement approaches beyond self-reports also include classic projective techniques (Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000) that assess persons’ responses to ambiguous stimuli. Their validity has been widely discussed in the last few decades (Bornstein, 1999; Viglione, 1999; Weiner, 1997) and newer developments, such as a semiprojective test, have been proposed with the aim of overcoming criticism leveled at projective tests, such as a shortage of objectivity in scoring and lack of interpretation of the scores based on normative samples (Sokolowski, Schmalt, Langens, & Puca, 2000). New computerized technologies further enabled a large number of testing procedures. The fledgling field is quickly growing, as demonstrated by a large number of new computerized objective personality tests building on Cattel’ s notion of the miniature situation (see Ortner & Schmitt, 2014) as well as by widely applied so-called indirect tests, mainly represented by reaction time measures (e.g., De Houwer, 2003; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Steward, 2005), but also including further indicators for indirect attitudes, such as evaluative decisions (Payne et al., 2005).

When addressing assessment instruments, procedures in the noncognitive domain (i.e., personality, affect, attitudes, and motivation), self-report questionnaires represent the dominant approach. All the behavior-based approaches mentioned are – compared with questionnaires assessing self-reports – much less frequently employed in most domains of psychological research (see Alonso-Arbiol & Van de Vijver, 2010; Ortner & Vormittag, 2011) and practice (Evers et al., 2012). Why are these approaches less visible, less used, and less within the focus of research compared with self-reports? As far as behavior observations, narratives, and most projective techniques are concerned, one of the main reasons may be the effort involved in collecting and processing behavioral observations to assess persons’ characteristics. Most behavior-based approaches of assessment produce much more data than questionnaires – data that need to be sorted, integrated, or summarized. Thus, test economy and procedural efforts may often be the reason to refrain from using these methods. However, this disadvantage does not apply to newer computerized indirect or objective testing procedures. The new technology may have led to their increased visibility and impact in current research.