Psychology Commons^™

Assessing Meaningful Within-Person Variability In Likert-Scale Rated Personality Descriptions: An Irt Tree Approach, Jonas W. B. Lang, Filip Lievens, Filip De Fruyt, Ingo Zettler, Jennifer L. Tackett

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Personality researchers and clinical psychologists have long been interested in withinperson variability in a given personality trait. Two critical methodological challenges that stymie current research on within-person variability are separating meaningful within-person variability from 1) true differences in trait level and 2) careless responding (or person unreliability). To partly avoid these issues, personality researchers commonly only study within-person variability in personality states over time using the standard deviation (SD) across repeated measurements of the same items (typically across days)—a relatively resource-intensive approach. In this article, we detail an approach that allows researchers to measure another type of within-person variability. The …