Personality Research Laboratory

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Welcome to the Personality Research Laboratory at Oklahoma State University!

Work in our laboratory is driven by two central premises. First, significant advances in the science of personality psychology are likely to depend on prior advances in measurement and quantitative analysis. Second, to be relevant, the scientific concepts employed by personality psychologists must enlighten our understanding of the individual person. In other words, the science of personality psychology must not be limited to what is traditionally termed nomothetic research.

As a result of these two premises, research in our laboratory is quantitative and idiographic in nature. Stating that our research is idiographic, however, is not an argument for the exclusion of nomothetic constructs or traditional nomothetic methodologies. In fact, much of our recent work has focused on developing methods for bridging the so-called idiographic-nomothetic divide. On the quantitative front, we have been employing a little-known type of confirmatory principal components analysis (Multiple Group Components Analysis) as well as Generalized Procrustes analysis to compare and merge idiographic and nomothetic ratings of self and others. With regard to idiographic methods, we have primarily been using variations of George Kelly's repertory grid technique to assess how individuals view themselves and others. In the future, we hope to resurrect and improve upon some old scaling methods. By using these methods, we hope to improve the quality of data obtained from the procedures we use in our lab. 

                        

Material on these web pages last updated: 15-August-2007.

These web pages were designed by James Barraclough before he graduated from the Department of Psychology at OSU.