Quantitative Methods Forum: Ian Davidson

When:
October 29, 2018 @ 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
2018-10-29T10:00:00-04:00
2018-10-29T11:30:00-04:00

Title: A map to every person? What intraindividual methods mean for trait psychology

Abstract: What do our quantitative methods allow us to study? Do our methods let psychologists study individuals, or are we limited to studying abstract groups? Within personality psychology, a longstanding critique of the quantitative trait approach is that it cannot produce knowledge about a single person. But over the past few decades, researchers have developed methods for quantitatively studying persons at the individual level—these are often called intraindividual methods. In this presentation, I will explain some of the basics about these methods. Although they are rooted in Raymond Cattell’s P-technique for factor analysis, one of the main intraindividual methods is an extension of the P-technique called dynamic factor analysis (DFA). DFA is a mixture of traditional latent variable models used in trait psychology and time series models often used in other fields. Finally, I will discuss some of the reception to research on the famous Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality using intraindividual methods. I argue that there is conceptual confusion over the phenomenon under investigation, and that a clear distinction between traits and states in intraindividual research is not always apparent.