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Overview
The Riverside Accuracy Project (RAP) is a
long-term investigation into several important topics relevant to the
assessment and perception of human personality. Funded for almost
two decades by the National Institute of Mental Health grant
R01-MH42427, the project more recently has gained support from National
Science Foundation grant 0642243. At present the lab is working
on three main projects:
1. Situational Assessment. We are
currently engaged in intensive data gathering for research on the
assessment of psychological situations. We have developed the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ)
and are using this instrument to assess situations experienced by
college students in daily life, and the correlates between elements of
situations, personality, and behavior. A new article reporting
research using this instrument has been accepted for publication in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Sherman, Nave & Funder, in press.)
2. Behavioral Correlates of Personality and
Health over Time. A new project is investigating the behavioral
correlates of personality as assessed decades earlier, along with
contemporaneous measures of personality and health. This project
is in collaboration with Lew Goldberg and Sarah Hampson of the Oregon
Research Institute. We are using the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort (RBQ)
to assess the behavior of participants in a personality diagnostic
interview. Other information available on these participants
includes personality judgments made of them by their teachers decades
earlier, and results of a recent, comprehensive health
assessment. A new article reporting findings from this project
has recently been accepted for publication in Social Psychological
and Personality Science (Nave, Sherman,
Funder, Hampson & Goldberg, in press).
3. Accuracy of Personality Judgment. This
research
program,
which
has
been running for the longest time (and is
the basis of the name of our lab) is based on the Realistic Accuracy
Model (Funder, 1995, 1999).
Theoretically,
the
model
proposes
that accurate personality judgment
requires a four-stage process in which (1) relevant information is
emitted by the target which (2) becomes available to the judge, who
then (3) detects this information and (4) utilizes it correctly.
Empirically, four moderator variables make accuracy more or less
likely, including properties of (1) the judge (e.g., judgmental
ability), (2) the target (e.g., judgability), (3) the trait being
judged (e.g., visibility), and (4) the information upon which the
judgment is based (e.g., its quantity or quality).
Our lab has gathered three large data sets
over the years. Each includes investigations of approximately 200
participants. Our data include self-reports of personality, peer
descriptions of personality, life history interviews and measurements
of behavior and life outcomes. Research using these data is
ongoing, including recent studies of the personality correlates of
language use in a life history interview (Fast & Funder, 2008, 2010).
Resources
We are pleased to provide four
new research resources.
1. Revised Behavioral
Q-sort. The Riverside Behavioral Q-sort has been revised for
more general use, outside of the laboratory contexts in which it has
been employed to date.
2. Riverside Situational
Q-sort. We are in the process of developing and testing a
Q-sort for the psychological description of situations.
3. Q-sorter program.
We have developed a free, downloadable program
for completing Q-sorts on the computer, thus making Q-sort descriptions
easier to complete and their data entry more accurate. We also
include files including the behavioral and situational Q-sorts
described above, along with the revised California Q-sort for the
description of personality.
If you are interested in any
of these, please go to our Qsort
Resources Page.
4. Program to conduct randomization
tests. This program, written by Ryne Sherman in the R
programming language, conducts a randomization test to evaluate (a)
the
number
of
significant
correlations between a single variable and a
large number of other variables, (b) the number of significant
correlations between two large sets of variables, and (c) the average
size of a large number of effects. Link
The relevant article is:
Sherman, R.A., & Funder, D.C. (2009). Evaluating correlations in
studies of personality and behavior: Beyond the number of significant
findings to be expected by chance. Journal
of
Research
in
Personality,
43, 1053-1063.
Link
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