HPS307/791 PERSONALITY
ASSESSMENT INFORMATION
T3 2020
Table of Contents
.................................................................................... 1
HPS307/791 PERSONALITY ............................................................................................... 1
ASSESSMENT INFORMATION ............................................................................................ 1
General introduction and background to the assessment tasks for HPS307/791 ................ 3
Overview of Assessment Tasks ......................................................................................... 3
Data for AT1 and AT2 ..................................................................................................................... 4
1. Lab Report—Due Friday 18th December, 8pm ............................................................... 5
1.1 The research topic .............................................................................................................. 5 1.2 Readings (AT1): .................................................................................................................. 7
HPS307 and HPS791 ....................................................................................................................... 7
1.3 Survey Information—AT1 and AT2 ...................................................................................... 8 i. International Personality Items Pool (IPIP) NEO (Goldberg et al., 2006; AT1 & AT2) ................. 8 ii. Ryff’s Psychological Well-being Scale (Ryff & Keyes, 1995) ....................................................... 8 iii. Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, 2009) ................................................................................ 8 iv. Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) ............................... 8 iii. Adolescent Pre-occupation with Screens Scale, modified (Hunter et al., 2017; AT1) .............. 8 iv. HEXACO Personality Inventory (Lee & Ashton, 2004; AT2) ....................................................... 9
1.4 Assessment criteria ............................................................................................................ 9
1.5 Word count ........................................................................................................................ 9 HPS307 and HPS791 ....................................................................................................................... 9
HPS791 additional challenge .......................................................................................................... 9
Both HPS307 and HPS791 .............................................................................................................. 9
1.6 Resubmission of Discussion section................................................................................... 10
2. Personality Profile Report—Due Friday 29th January, 8pm ........................................... 11
2.1 Assessment criteria .......................................................................................................... 11 2.2 Word count ...................................................................................................................... 12
3. Exam .......................................................................................................................... 12
References ..................................................................................................................... 13
General introduction and background to the assessment tasks for HPS307/791
HPS307/791 has four main aims:
1. Understand the major theoretical approaches used to explain consistent patterns in thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
These theories underlie the major approaches used to treat clients in clinical and healthrelated contexts, and are also relevant to understanding behaviour in other settings such as organisations.
2. Be able to apply these theories to solve realistic problems.
It is important that you have some understanding of how to apply theoretical frameworks in a way that allows you to gain insights into behaviours you may want to alter.
3. Develop your analytical and communication skills.
Research has shown that both employers and recent graduates rate graduate skills (especially communication skills) as one of the most important factors affecting employability. Also, many of you want to move into a fourth year and then postgraduate programs. Analytical and communication skills (especially written) are very important to success in these courses, which have a substantial thesis component.
4. Understand how personality inventories are used to assess personality.
Like almost all constructs that we study in psychology, personality is a not a physical ‘thing’ that can be objectively measured. Hence, in order to try to measure something we cannot see, we create scales that are tested on big populations, and feel reasonably confident that they are measuring what we think they are measuring. Understanding the psychometric properties of different scales, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, is an important part of being able to decide what scale, if any, you use in applied practice or a research design.
The readings and assignment tasks are designed to not only improve your application, analytical, and writing skills in the context of personality theory, but also your interest in the subject matter. We hope that this will help you perform well on the assessment tasks, but more importantly, that they will teach you important skills that will help you in your next challenge, regardless of whether you enter the workforce or continue to do further study.
Overview of Assessment Tasks
The assessment tasks for HPS307/791 consist of:
• Assessment 1: Lab report (45% of overall grade)
• Assessment 2: Personality Profile report (25% of overall grade)
• Assessment 3: Examination (30% of overall grade)
Two major features of this unit are that we (a) base your AT1 lab report on real data that we will collect at the start of trimester, and (b) we return your own personality profile data to you for use in AT2. We hope that this will help you feel connected to the assessments and be inspired to delve deeply into understanding your own personality as well as the processes involved in understanding personality more generally.
We will help you develop the skills required for your assessment tasks in the seminar stream, and I encourage you to take advantage of the seminars to your fullest ability.
Data for AT1 and AT2
We need to collect data for your lab report and your personality profile report, so we would like you to consider completing a survey about personality and some additional outcome measures (described below). This aspect of the unit is entirely voluntary. If you do not wish to complete the survey, the data you use for AT2 will be that of a made-up person (there is no advantage or disadvantage to this, though perhaps may not be as interesting for you as using your own data). There will be a Plain Language Statement at the start of the survey, which explains that you are able to contribute your data to ongoing research in this area if you would like to. You have no obligation whatsoever to consent to contributing your data. If you decline to have your data pooled for research purposes, it will be deleted at the end of T3 (i.e. when your assessment tasks are completed and marked). If you consent to contributing your data, it will be anonymised before being added to a larger data set. The data may be used in journal publications. There is no compulsion to allow your de-identified data to be used in this way, and the unit team, including the Unit Chair, will not know if you have elected to contribute your data or not. It’s wholly your decision.
In addition to providing you with your own data, we have developed a methodology to enable us to give you other people’s assessment of your personality. This aspect of AT2 is usually interesting and sometimes enlightening, but importantly it is a really good way to help you develop a first-hand understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of personality testing. At the end of your survey, you will have an opportunity to invite three people who know you really well to complete the same personality inventories that you did, however the questions they answer will be asking about you. That means we can give you personality data as you see yourself, and an averaged profile of how other people see you (i.e. averaged across the three people who have completed the personality inventory for you). Will they be the same or different? What does it mean if other people do not see you the way you see yourself? These are the sorts of really interesting questions that can come out of the AT2 process!
Please note: in order to protect relationships, we will give you your other-rater data back as an averaged profile. That is, you will get one set of scores for all three other-raters. This is to ensure that your other-raters feel free to answer the questions about you truthfully, as they will know that you will not be able to see how they rated you. It is quite possible, in fact probable, that the people who love or care for you may alter their responses about your personality in a socially desirable way if they know you will see what they said!
Before you enter the other-rater’s email addresses in the survey, please contact each person you would like to nominate, and ask them if they mind completing the survey. You can reassure them that they should answer the questions honestly, and that you will not ever know what their actual responses were (because they will be averaged with two other people’s responses). This aspect of the assessment is a big undertaking, and involves a lot of planning and coordination on our part and on yours, but it does provide you with some really interesting data to sink your teeth into. If your other-raters have any questions that you are not sure how to answer, please feel free to email the HPS307 or HPS791 inboxes.
1. Lab Report—Due Friday 18th December, 8pm
Your task is to write up a study that investigates the stability of personality and problematic smartphone use, and the relationship between the two. HPS307 students will consider one personality factor and problematic smartphone use, while HPS791 students will consider two personality factors and problematic smartphone use. To orient you to this task, an overview of the rationale underlying the study is provided below.
Note: The survey will have items that measure personality, well-being, COVID19 behaviours, problematic smartphone use, and motivation. We will look at the COVID19 data in seminars and consider whether personality can predict how people behave in a truly novel situation (i.e. a pandemic). The smartphone data will form the basis of the lab report. The T3 cohort is typically quite small, so we asked T2 students to complete the additional items to provide a robust sample size for the T3 cohort. Finally, the students of HPS121 in T2 also completed this survey and used the personality and motivation data for their lab report. We have combined the data collection for these two units so that both have a really robust sample size to work with. In the case of HPS307/791, we are conducting genuine, publishable research – nothing here is contrived for assessment purposes only. You’ll be engaged with a real research project, in real time, with real data that will contribute to the personality literature. Exciting!
1.1 The research topic
Over the past decade, a completely novel individual and social issue has been emerging – problematic smartphone use (also occasionally referred to as smartphone addiction, internet addiction, screen addiction). Social media and easy access to the online world has become a ubiquitous and normal part of life, however our consumption of internet-based media is far from what might have been considered normal in the past.
Excessive screen use can become problematic for some people. Addiction-like behaviours can emerge, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal. Addiction to screens has been associated with decreases in productivity, social functioning, positive affect, and well-being. In the case of adolescents, the potential developmental impacts of screen addiction (for example, neurological development, social skills development, intimate relationship formation etc.) will not be known for many years to come.
The current conditions of the COVID19 pandemic may also impact smartphone use behaviour. With many cities experiencing lockdowns in 2020 and the ongoing threat of outbreaks, people have been spending much more time at home, and much less time socialising in person. These conditions may potentially exacerbate problematic smartphone use, but perhaps not to the same extent for everyone. There are known individual differences in the extent to which people are prone to problematic smartphone use, and thus some people may be more prone to increased problematic smartphone use under the current conditions. Furthermore, even our personality traits may be impacted by the conditions of the COVID19 pandemic, since research suggests that major life events can impact something as stable as personality. Bringing these two together, it may be the case that the link between personality factors and problematic smartphone use may become stronger or weaker under the conditions of the COVID19 pandemic.
In order to look more closely at this issue, we will investigate whether the relationship between personality and problematic smart phone use remains statistically unchanged under these conditions of prolonged stress. Specifically, HPS307 students will look at one Big 5 personality factor and problematic smart phone use. HPS791 students will look at any two Big 5 personality factors and problematic smart phone use. You will learn about the trait perspective in week 2, so we will not go into any detail about the personality factors here.
Your hypotheses should follow this format:
Hypothesis 1 will be based on problematic smart phone use. You will need to think about whether you expect the mean score for problematic smartphone use to be different under COVID19 conditions (2020) compared to non-COVID19 conditions (2019).
In the same vein as H1, Hypothesis 2 will be based on your prediction of whether the mean score for your chosen Big 5 personality factor will have remained the same or changed between 2019 and 2020, given the changed conditions. You will need to apply your understanding of what your chosen factor is, how stable it is likely to be, and the direction of the change (if you hypothesise there will be one). HPS791 students will have one hypothesis for each of the two personality factors they choose.
Hypothesis 3 will be based on the correlation between your chosen personality factor and problematic smartphone use. This is the most challenging hypothesis, and will require you to think critically about both personality and problematic smartphone use. You will hypothesise about whether the relationship between your chosen personality factor and problematic smartphone use may have changed under COVID19 pandemic conditions. If you predict a change, you will need to state the direction (i.e. stronger or weaker now, compared to then).
HPS791 students have two additional hypotheses:
As per H2, but you will predict mean change for two personality factors, and;
As per H3, but you will predict whether the relationship between your two chosen personality factors and problematic smartphone use will have changed or stayed the same.
Deciding on your hypotheses
The first step is to develop an understanding of what the personality factors are, what they ‘look like’. Which personality factor you choose for your research report is up to you, but you will need to think about how each factor might be expressed or suppressed under COVID19 conditions. For example, how might someone high in extraversion experience the pandemic? How might someone who is high in conscientiousness behave during a health crisis? This is an application of critical thinking to the trait x environment interaction.
In order to make a prediction for hypothesis 3, you will need to think through hypotheses 1 and 2 carefully. Once you determine what you think will happen with your personality factor and problematic smartphone use, you can think through what this means for their relationship with one another.
We will spend time talking through these ideas in our seminars, but you will also need to read relevant journal articles and apply your understanding of the unit content to these questions.
The papers we have supplied you with give you a grounding in what the variables are, and the most current research on their relationship to each other. You must include these papers in your lab report, as well as any other articles you deem appropriate. You will need to do some research yourself in addition to these publications. There is no minimum number of references aside from those that we have supplied. We would prefer you to have fewer articles that are well-chosen, relevant and reliable than lots of articles that are not high quality or are poorly-used in your report. It is quality over quantity that matters.
1.2 Readings (AT1):
These papers are available for you to download in the AT1 folder in Cloud Deakin. We will begin working on the Lab Report in our Week 2 seminar, but you are encouraged to start thinking and reading as early as possible.
HPS307 and HPS791
Horwood, S., & Anglim, J. (2018). Personality and problematic smartphone use: A facet-level analysis using the Five Factor Model and HEXACO frameworks. Computers in Human Behavior, 85, 349-359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.04.013
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C. J., & Lucas, R. E. (2018). Life events and personality trait change. Journal of Personality, 86, 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12286
1.3 Survey Information—AT1 and AT2
We will use the following questionnaires in our survey. Not all of them are relevant to the assessment tasks, but the notation beside each reference indicates whether they are relevant to AT1 or AT2 (or both). You are welcome to look up the associated papers – the references are at the end of this document. The below information will be enough for you to write up your materials section for AT1. You can copy and paste but you may also like to finesse them a little and, where appropriate, format it in APA 7th style. Remember to only include the scales we used for AT1 data in your materials section.
i. International Personality Items Pool (IPIP) NEO (Goldberg et al., 2006; AT1 & AT2)
The IPIP NEO is a 50-item self-report inventory that provides a measure of the Big 5 factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to experience. Items are answered on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Very inaccurate’ to 5 = ‘Very accurate’.
ii. Ryff’s Psychological Well-being Scale (Ryff & Keyes, 1995)
This scale is a 42-item self-report measure of psychological well-being across six dimensions: Autonomy, Environmental Mastery, Personal Growth, Positive Relations, Purpose in Life, and Self-acceptance. Items are scored on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Strongly disagree’ to 6 = ‘Strongly agree’.
iii. Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, 2009)
This 5-item self-report scale assesses an individual’s overall sense of satisfaction and contentedness with their life. It provides a global measure of subjective well-being. The five items are scored on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Strongly disagree’ to 7 = ‘Strongly agree’.
iv. Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988)
The PANAS is a 20-item self-report scale where respondents rate their feelings and emotions over the past week. Items are scored on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Very slightly or not at all’ to 5 = ‘Extremely’.
iii. Adolescent Pre-occupation with Screens Scale, modified (Hunter et al., 2017; AT1)
This 21-item self-report scale assesses potential preoccupation with screen use across a broad range of screens and screen-based activities in non-clinical settings. The items are scored on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Never’ to 5 = ‘Always’. The scale has been modified for adult use by changing the word ‘parents’ to ‘family and friends’. The word ‘screens’ has been replaced with a more specific criteria, ‘smartphone’.
iv. HEXACO Personality Inventory (Lee & Ashton, 2004; AT2)
This 100-item inventory measures the six personality factors of Honesty-humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. It also measures the facets that underpin each factor. Items are answered on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = ‘Strongly Disagree’ to 5 = ‘Strongly Agree’.
1.4 Assessment criteria
The assessment criteria will be posted in the assignment folder of Cloud Deakin. The criteria are generic lab report criteria, designed to ensure that the guidance you get in all units is the same. Broadly, your Lab Report will be evaluated according to:
1. How well your Abstract provides a concise but meaningful description of the study.
2. How well you explain the importance of the study, and how it addresses a problem or gap in the literature.
3. How well your Method section describes what was done to answer the research question.
4. How well your Results section describes how the data were prepared and analysed, as well as what was found.
5. How well you interpret and synthesise the results in your Discussion, factoring in the aims, hypotheses, and broader literature.
6. Your overall writing style (i.e. scientific writing).
1.5 Word count
HPS307 and HPS791
Your Lab Report should be approximately 2,000 words. You can be over or under by 10%, but do try to stick to 2,000 as much as possible. The title page, Abstract, tables (including table headings) and reference list are not included in your word count. In-text citations are counted. Your Abstract should be around 200 words.
HPS791 additional challenge
HPS791 students have the same word limit as HPS307, but you must incorporate the additional hypotheses. Hence, your writing will need to be concise and to the point in order to cover all of the necessary aspects of the task.
Both HPS307 and HPS791
At the third-year level, you will need to increase the number of resources you access from previous years. Keep in mind, that if you go on to fourth year and beyond, the number of resources you need to integrate into your writing jumps pretty significantly, so this is a good chance to hone your research and concise writing skills. There is no minimum number of articles to incorporate, but in order to write a reasonable lab report, you will need to read more widely than the articles provided. Remember, we are not so much looking at how many papers you use, but how you use the papers you choose.
Limit your search of the literature to the past 5-10 years so that you are not overwhelmed with papers to review. Many of the papers you find in your search might not be relevant once you read them, so make sure you choose carefully.
Given the word limit, you will not be able to critique each of these fully. However, there will be a few papers that are highly relevant that you should focus on more fully than some of the others. You could consider the similarities between the papers so that you might group them together in some way to discuss them.
Your review should provide a critique of what has been found in the literature to date and the gap or gaps in that literature that your study aims to address.
1.6 Resubmission of Discussion section
This is an optional step. When your Lab Report is returned to you, your marker will have left lots of actionable feedback. In order to help you develop your research and writing skills, you may choose up to five (5) separate items of feedback to action for an additional point per item (i.e. an additional 5/100)*. If your marker has not been able to identify five items to improve on in your discussion, your work is already at a very high standard. You can still address the points they have raised, however, your marks are capped at the number of points raised.
Very important: In order for your marker to see the changes you have made, you must use the ‘track changes’ tool on your resubmitted document (instructions for using track changes in the Resubmission Resources folder, under AT1). Resubmitted assignments that do not show the changes that have been made will not be marked (markers are not allocated time to compare documents looking for what has been updated – you must make it very clear for your marker).
For students who received less than 45/100 for their Lab report, resubmission can be undertaken in order to achieve a maximum score of 50/100 for the task. The resubmission must demonstrate substantial improvements by addressing most, if not all of the marker’s major comments in all sections of the report.
In order to achieve further marks, you must demonstrate that you have thought about, and actioned, meaningful aspects of your marker’s feedback. Minor formatting and editing issues that are pointed out should be obvious to you, so the following list of minor writing issues can (and should) be corrected, but do not attract points in the resubmission process.
1. Punctuation errors.
2. Spelling errors.
3. Deletion of text without replacement.
4. An error that occurs multiple times. If your marker indicates that you have a mistake (e.g. APA formatting error) that occurs throughout your report, you must correct all instances of the error to be awarded the point.
5. Replacing an older reference with a newer one without changing the text in the associated paragraph.
6. Anything that your marker has denoted with an asterisk (*).
The main thing we hope that you will do is take note of any conceptual feedback that your marker gives you. This is an excellent opportunity to check that your report is on track.
* Your final score cannot exceed the maximum points available. For example, if your overall score is 96/100 after first marking, you can only be awarded a maximum of four more marks in the resubmission process.
2. Personality Profile Report—Due Friday 29th January, 8pm
This assessment will require you to score and plot your own personality profile data and your other-rater profile data. You will have self and other Big 5 factor scores, and self and other HEXACO factor and facet scores. We will step you through scoring and plotting your profiles in seminar time.
The report will be in short answer format, and questions will relate to aspects of personality testing and the usefulness (or not) of conducting personality assessments. This assessment task is designed to help you develop a sense of the accuracy of personality inventories (you will be able to judge if your profile really reflects who you are), as well as their uses and their limitations.
HPS791 students will have one additional question to respond to. The additional item will relate to the construction of personality inventories.
2.1 Assessment criteria
Your Personality Profile Report will be evaluated according to the rubric supplied in the AT2 folder. Broadly, the assessment pertains to;
1. Your interpretation and understanding of the scores across the Big 5 and HEXACO inventories.
2. How well you apply critical thinking and reasoning to self-versus-other-rater data which we use to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the inventories.
Given the above discussions, a position on personality testing is provided with rationale and justification to support the perspective.
2.2 Word count
The word limit for this assignment ranges from 1,000-1,500 words. You may go 10% (150 words) over 1,500 without attracting a penalty. This is because we know that your profiles are all unique and some people may have more to write about than others; however, this is not meant to be a lengthy piece of work. It is expected that you will be succinct.
No marks are allocated to formatting or APA style. You can simply answer the questions in a
‘question and answer’ format, however you still must still write well and use full sentences (i.e. no dot points etc.). You are not required to provide in-text citations or a reference list, but it is good practice to acknowledge others’ work if you do happen to include a reference.
3. Exam
Your final assessment is a multiple-choice examination of the learning outcomes covered by the textbook and any other assessable readings noted in Cloud Deakin. In T3 the exam will be held during the normal Deakin University examination period in 2021, and in line with COVID19 assessment policy.
I hope you find this unit interesting as well as challenging.
Have a great T3!
Beatrice
References
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C. J., & Lucas, R. E. (2018). Life events and personality trait change. Journal of Personality, 86, 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12286 Diener, E., Lucas, R., & Oishi, S. (2009). Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and
Life Satisfaction. In Lopez & Snyder (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2009 ed., Vol. 2nd Edition, pp. 63-73). Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. C. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 80-96.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007
Horwood, S., & Anglim, J. (2018). Personality and problematic smartphone use: A facet-level analysis using the Five Factor Model and HEXACO frameworks. Computers in Human
Behavior, 85, 349-359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.04.013
Hunter, S. C., Houghton, S., Zadow, C., Rosenberg, M., Wood, L., Shilton, T., & Lawrence, D.
(2017). Development of the Adolescent Preoccupation with Screens Scale. BMC
Public Health, 17, 652. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4657-1 Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004). Psychometric properties of the HEXACO personality inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39, 329-358.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr3902_8
Ryff, C. D., & Keyes, C. L. M. (1995). The structure of psychological well-being revisited.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 719-727.
http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.4.719
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063-1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063