PSYC 2600 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Lexical Hypothesis, Precautionary Statement, Factor Analysis
1 Feb 2018
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Psyc2600 personality week 3 - traits and trait taxonomies. How do traits impact our behaviour: differentiate between researching traits and using traits in research. Questions: trait descriptive adjectives (words) that describe traits (attributes of a person that are characteristic of a person and perhaps enduring over time) What is a trait: traits as internal causal properties vs. traits as purely descriptive summaries. Three approaches: lexical approach, statistical approach, theoretical approach. Lexical approach: lexical hypothesis, all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language, trait terms are important for people in communicating with others, two criteria for identifying important traits, synonym frequency, cross-cultural universality. Cautionary note: you only get out of factor analysis what you put in; thus, researchers must pay attention to the initial selection items. Theoretical approach: starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important example: freudian.
