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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 three 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, please go to our Qsort
Resources Page.
Note Concerning Grant
Support
The material described in these
web pages is based, in part, upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. 06422243. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the individual researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.
Questions?
Comments? Contact us at
rap@ucr.edu
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