Identifying Causes of Disagreement Between Self‐Reports and Spouse Ratings of Personality

Abstract

Self-reports and spouse ratings of personality traits typically show less-than-perfect agreement, but powerful moderators of agreement have not yet been identified. In Study 1, 47 married couples completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory to describe themselves and their spouses. Extent of agreement was not consistently moderated by response sets; the age, intelligence, or education of the respondent; or the length or quality of the relationship. In Study 2 these couples were interviewed about reasons for substantial disagreements, and an audiotape was content-analyzed. Sixteen reasons were reliably coded, including idiosyncratic understanding of items, reference to different time frames or roles, and unavailability of covert experience to the spouse. Faking good, assumed similarity, and other variables prominent in the psychometric literature were relatively unimportant. Findings (1) suggest that attempts to improve the validity of self-reports and ratings may need to be refocused and (2) underscore the desirability of routinely obtaining multiple sources of information on personality.

Relationships between Self- and Peer-reported Integrative Self-knowledge and the Big Five Factors in Iran

“…Finally, these data demonstrated that peer-report procedures were valid in exploring personality processes in an Iranian sample. Further supporting that conclusion were observations that correlations obtained in the present project were generally comparable to self-and peer-report correlations observed between Big Five measures in samples examined in other societies (e.g., Robins 1994, 1993;Clifton et al 2004;Kolar et al 1996;McCrae et al 1998).…”

“…Numerous studies have in fact documented the utility of examining correlations between self-report and peer-report assessments of personality constructs and have essentially argued that such data yield a more objective, behaviorally-based source of evidence (e.g., Robins 1994, 1993;Clifton et al 2004;Kolar et al 1996;McCrae et al 1998). In the present investigation, selfreport and peer-report evaluations of self-knowledge were obtained from Iranian students who lived together in a university dormitory.…”

Fear of Muslims: Psychometric evaluation of the Islamophobia Scale.

“…and they have also demonstrated significant cross-observer consistency in psychological research (Blackman & Funder, 1998;McCrae, Stone, Fagan, & Costa, 1998;Nave, Sherman, & Funder, 2008). The constructs analyzed in this study were right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), trait forgiveness (TF), and the fear of spiders (FS) and heights (FH).…”

Agreement Between Parent- and Self-Reports of Psychopathic Traits and Externalizing Behaviors in a Clinical Sample

“…Participants were recruited from both clinical (e.g., mental health centers, juvenile justice agencies) and community (e.g., flyers, newspaper advertisements) settings. These findings are comparable, but somewhat higher than correlations found for multiple informant ratings of adult personality, which typically range from 0.30 to 0.39 across personality traits [19,20]. However, they are considerably higher than is typically found in the assessment of broadband child's behavioral and emotional problems [1].…”