Riverside Accuracy Project

 

Overview

 

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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