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Overview
The International
Situations Project
Our current focuses on
situational assessment
across cultures (along with collaborators in
Japan, China,
Italy and many other countries). For the first
paper from the international project, reporting some
preliminary data from the US and Japan, click
here.
For a more comprehensive paper, reporting comparisons of situational
experience across 20 countries, click here.
For a second paper, focusing on comparisons of behavioral
reports across 21 countries, click here. For the funded grant proposal for the
"International Situations Project" (NSF
BCS-1528131) that is working to expand
this project to more countries and wider samples around the
world, click here. In close
collaboration with an amazing international team of
researchers, we are currently gathering data in 43 countries
(and in more than 30 languages), with more expected soon.
The Riverside Accuracy
Project
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 gained support from National
Science Foundation grant BCS-0642243.
This
research
program is based on the Realistic Accuracy
Model (Funder, 1995, 1999,
2012).
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). For a summary of this research, click here.
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 studies of the personality correlates of
language use in a life history interview (Fast & Funder, 2008, 2010).
Situational Assessment. The foundation of the
International Situations Project is our prior research on the assessment of the psychologically
important aspects of situations. For a recently
published overview, click here. We have developed the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ)
and have used this instrument to assess situations
experienced by college students in daily life, and the
correlates among elements of situations, personality, and
behavior. Articles introducing and using this
instrument have been published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2010) and the Journal of Research in
Personality (Sherman,
Nave & Funder, 2012,
2013). Further work in progress addresses
"construal," the ways different people may perceive the same situation. For the grant proposal to NSF that describes the purpose and
procedures of our study on "situational construal," click
here.
Another facet of this
research explores the implications of situations categorized
on the basis of their relevance to evolutionary theory.
UCR Undergraduates:
Interested in working in our lab for academic credit?
For the application,
click here.
Resources
We are pleased to provide these 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
The relevant article is:
Sherman, R.A., & Funder, D.C. (2009). Evaluating correlations in
studies of personality and behavior: Beyond the number of significant
findings to be expected by chance. Journal
of
Research
in
Personality,
43, 1053-1063.
Link
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