Date of Award

5-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Committee Member

Fred Switzer, Committee Chair

Committee Member

Patrick Rosopa

Committee Member

Mary Anne Taylor

Abstract

A problem that has arisen in the field of personality psychology is that while personality traits are related to outcome variables, the predictive validity of these associations is low to medium (Rosenthal, 1994; Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1989). One of the reasons for this is because personality has traditionally been defined as something generalizable across situations and time. This generalizability across situations and time is called the invariance of personality (Mischel, 2004). We argue that personality is stable at a different level of analysis, and that level of analysis is the specific context, but not stable across different situations. The current study looked at a fully contextualized personality measure and compared it to a non-contextualized measure of the same personality trait/facets to assess whether incremental validity can be gained by targeting specific situations. Results show that despite the presence of nuisance factors for both general and academic conscientiousness that the contextualized measure showed incremental validity.

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