On the nature of intraindividual personality variability: reliability, validity, and associations with well-being.
Intraindividual personality variability is a construct that reflects the extent to which a person's self-reported personality changes over time or across social roles. Past studies have linked variability with important outcomes such as adjustment and well-being. However, existing variability measures conflate mean-level variance with true change over time, and thus these past findings are questionable. Three studies were conducted to examine the psychometric properties of existing variability indexes and to develop a new index that does not suffer from the problem of conflated variance. This new index is reliable and valid and can predict actual changes in self-reports over time. However, once mean-level variance is removed, intraindividual variability is no longer related to well-being.
Baird
Brendan M
BM
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. bairdbr1@msu.edu
Le
Kimdy
K
Lucas
Richard E
RE
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D010551:Personality; D010555:Personality Inventory; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012917:Social Adjustment; D013334:Students; D013997:Time Factors