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The
Riverside Accuracy Project (RAP) is a long-term
investigation into several important topics relevant to
the assessment and perception of human personality.
Funded for almost two decades by the National Institute of
Mental Health grant R01-MH42427, the project more recently
has gained support from National Science Foundation grant
0642243. At present the lab is working on three main
projects:
1.
Accuracy of Personality Judgment. This research
is based on the Realistic Accuracy Model (Funder,
1995, 1999).
Theoretically, the model proposes that accurate
personality judgment requires a four-stage process in
which (1) relevant information is emitted by the target
which (2) becomes available to the judge, who then (3)
detects this information and (4) utilizes it correctly.
Empirically, four moderator variables make accuracy more
or less likely, including properties of (1) the judge
(e.g., judgmental ability), (2) the target (e.g.,
judgability), (3) the trait being judged (e.g.,
visibility), and (4) the information upon which the
judgment is based (e.g., its quantity or quality).
Our
lab has gathered three large data sets over the years.
Each includes investigations of approximately 200
participants. Our data include self-reports of
personality, peer descriptions of personality, life
history interviews and measurements of behavior and life
outcomes. Research using these data is ongoing,
including recent studies of the personality correlates of
language use in a life history interview (Fast
& Funder, 2008).
2.
Situational Assessment. We are currently engaged
in intensive data gathering for research on the assessment
of psychological situations. We have developed the Riverside
Situational Q-sort (RSQ) and are using this instrument
to assess situations experienced by college students in
daily life, and the correlates between elements of
situations, personality, and behavior.
3.
Behavioral Correlates of Personality and Health over Time.
A new project is investigating the behavioral correlates
of personality as assessed decades earlier, along with
contemporaneous measures of personality and health.
This project is in collaboration with Lew Goldberg and
Sarah Hampson of the Oregon Research Institute. We
are using the Riverside
Behavioral Q-sort (RBQ) to assess the behavior of
participants in a personality diagnostic interview.
Other information available on these participants includes
personality judgments made of them by their teachers
decades earlier, and results of a recent, comprehensive
health assessment.
Resources
We
are pleased to provide four new research resources.
1.
Revised Behavioral Q-sort. The Riverside
Behavioral Q-sort has been revised for more general use,
outside of the laboratory contexts in which it has been
employed to date.
2.
Riverside Situational Q-sort. We are in the
process of developing and testing a Q-sort for the
psychological description of situations.
3.
Q-sorter program. We have developed a free,
downloadable program for completing Q-sorts on the
computer, thus making Q-sort descriptions easier to
complete and their data entry more accurate. We also
include files including the behavioral and situational
Q-sorts described above, along with the revised California
Q-sort for the description of personality.
If
you are interested in any of these, please go to our Qsort
Resources Page.
4.
Program to conduct randomization tests. This
program, written by Ryne Sherman in the R programming
language, conducts a randomization test to evaluate (a)
the number of significant correlations between a single
variable and a large number of other variables, (b) the
number of significant correlations between two large sets
of variables, and (c) the average size of a large number
of effects. Link
NEW!
Pre-publication
version of
Funder, D.C., & Fast, L.A( in press). Personality in social psychology. In D.Gilbert
& S. Fiske (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed.). New York: Wiley.
link
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