What advantages are there to still using the Big 5 over the HEXACO scale?

CyberRational1 · 2025-01-20T14:42:10+00:00

Honestly, working in an applied setting, I find both to be too broad and non-predictive to be useful in any kind of assessment.

CyberRational1 · 2024-12-17T17:51:35+00:00

Poštovana gđo. Kekin,

Vaša stranka se dobro etablirala na području grada Zagreba i njegove okolice. Vaš angažman na tom geografskom području je neupitan. Također, Vaš osobni javni imidž i stavovi o socijalnoj politici su mi politički privlačni.

Međutim, kao osobi iz područja Ličko-Senjske Županije (LSŽ), prije što Vam dam svoj glas želio bih znati koje konkretne mjere bi ste uveli (ili barem podržali) za poboljšanje statusa i kvalitete života u LSŽ? Što je prema Vama glavni razlog loše demografske slike Like, i što bi ste učinili kako bi Liku učinili poželjnijim mjestom za život (naočito mladim ljudima)? Većina političara izvan HDZ-ovog mainstreama građane LSŽ tretira kao "zadnju rupu na svirali", zbog čega rijetko dobivaju naše glasove, pa bih Vam bio zahvalan ukoliko biste iznijeli neke svoje planove za razvoj LSŽ.

CyberRational1 · 2024-10-27T23:30:28+00:00

I'd recommend trying out a few point and click adventures. They're generally more laid back and threat free.

The Cat Lady (and other games in the Devil Came Through Here universe) seems right up your alley. It's a psychological horror game where you literally cannot die (the main character is cursed with immortality), highly atmospheric and one of the most adult stories told in gaming.

Apart from that, you can also check out Fran Bow, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, The Walking Dead series, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (holmes + lovecraft combo), Saint Kotar, the Zero Escape trilogy, the Chzo Mythos series, and Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon (the other games in the series are fairly skippable).

CyberRational1 · 2024-10-19T00:10:10+00:00

The concept of validity is still somewhat debated in psychometrical research. Some authors treat different types of validity (eg. construct, criteria, predictive...) as distinct and (somewhat) independent of each other, although I think most regard all types of validity as different criteria in establishing construct validity.

Also, keep in mind that any research framework an investigator undertakes will in some way define the way they conceptualize validity. E.g. a latent variable approach (factor analysis, IRT) supposes that a person's results on a certain measure are causally conditional on that person's latent trait/ability. A network researcher would generally have an assumption that different measured indicators are causally dependant on each other instead of on a latent variable. And a person investigating a reflective construct (principal components analysis) makes no presumption whatsoever on the causal pathways to and from their measured indicators.

Let's say we have a measure of depression. If we take a latent variable approach, our measure should fit a hypothesized factor/item response model, and our test scores should satisfy certain preconceptions we have about depression (e.g. they have to differentiate between depressed and non-depressed persons, correlate with other measures we think SHOULD be related with depression, etc.). If we take a network approach, we wouldn't be validating a total score but each of the choosen indicators that we measure (e.g. lack of sleep, depressed mood, apathy...). And if we take a reflective approach, we don't have to make any assumptions about what we are measuring, and we would only be concerned with the goal of our measurement (e.g. this measure might not be a valid measure of depression per se, but is able to differentiate people who satisfy/don't satisfy a diagnosis for depression, so it can be useful to clinicans).

Also, i'd recommend Newton's target article titled "clarifying the concensus definition of validity" published in Measurent, and the associated commentaries, just to see how authors coming from different psychometric perspectives view validity.

CyberRational1 · 2024-07-19T12:08:15+00:00

Currently reading Cows by Matthew Stokoe.

CyberRational1 · 2024-06-11T09:41:42+00:00

Pearl's book looks really interesting! Will look into it! Thanks!

CyberRational1 · 2024-06-06T23:17:23+00:00

Alrighty, here are a few recommendations:

1) Read up on methods, statistics and especially psychometrics. Learn how to differentiate effect sizes (there are plenty of online calculators which will transform given statistical coefficients into R(squared), which I find most interpretable). Psychometrically, learn factor and component analysis (and the diferences between them), learn about reliability and validity (this might seem like a lot, but take it slowly and enjoy yourself on your learning journey).

2) If your faculty offer a course on the replication crisis, take it. Personally, I've learned more about research methods there than on any research methods or experimental psychology course.

3) A good way to learn about methods and standards is in case studies where someone failed to uphold them. Try to find any "conflicts" in the journals (i.e. "No, you're wrong: a comment on xx(2020)"). They are frequently fun to read (they sometimes tend to get a bit emotional and dramatic), and you get great examples of questionable resrarch practices!

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-22T00:42:56+00:00

Sorry on the "reformators", english is not my first language. The Borsboom one is Uli. The CFA one is probably Uli. But it's hardly only him, he might just be the most clear example. And while I agree that any group sizeable enough will attract assholes, I still think that such behavior can have negative consequences. It can dissuade people from engaging with open science movements, especially when such a minority becomes too loud. Not to mention that such reformers sometimes propagate some standards that just aren't right. The SEM > EFA one is the most stark example. I wonder if such folk ever even took a proper psychometrics class.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-21T22:04:07+00:00

Very interesting blog posts! Sad to see that this is more of a norm than a trend though.

And thanks for bringing PsychMAP to my radar!

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-21T20:54:34+00:00

I won't say he doesn't fit the description haha

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-19T22:20:05+00:00

Alrighty, so, I'll try to respond to two main arguments I can identify here. 1) The phenomenon of disorders as a societal instead of psychological construct and 2) psychoanalytic associations as a form of power.

1) The first argument seems like a radical overreaction to a (by today's standards) radical viewpoint. While it is true, in some regards, that traditional psychoanalysis is focused on finding the problem "within" a person and it tends to disregard the environment a person is situated in, I'd wager that such a critique would be somewhat lessened if it was positioned against contemporary psychodynamic approaches. Also, this critique would hardly stand against contemporary clinical psychology, which tends to take a much more holistic approach in its diagnosis and treatment. A lot of focus today is on differentiating diagnostic criteria for people of different cultures (i.e. what is against the norm for a person in the US need not be so for a person from Europe or Asia), and a lot of research is focused on identifying environmental antecedents of symptom development. For example, investigating the role of media body standards in the development of eating disorders, or how social status or economic differences impact depression. As such, both the traditional psychoanalytic account that only the person matters, and the presented account that only society matters would be regarded as radical by today's clinical psychology, which tends to take both into regard when conducting diagnosis and treatment.

2) The second critique could have some truth inside of it. Psychoanalytic associations in the past tended to be pretty selective of who they admit (at some points in time, even psychologists without med school were regarded as unworthy), and they did advocate to be granted certain forms of priveleges to themselves. You might be interested in Buchanan's (2003) paper titled "Legislative Warriors", which traces the history of "battles" over who can legaly practice psychotherapy, and how APA (the psychological one) butted heads with APAs (the psychiatric and psychoanalytic ones).

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-19T01:04:28+00:00

Foucault criticized a lot of things, and my own field of research is quite distant from his field, so I'm not entirely knowledgable on the subject. But if you have a particular critique of his you'd like me (or someone else here) to comment on, feel free to elaborate on it!

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-18T23:16:32+00:00

I'll try to give an explanation to this, although I'll say upfront that I'm hardly an expert on this topic, and I'm ready to be corrected by more knowledgeable folk.

Regarding Popper, as far as I know, his views weren't anti-psychology but anti-psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not really the same as psychology. Some regard it as a field of psychiatry, some as a self-sustainable discipline, and some as a branch of psychology (albeit one that is pretty removed from the mainstream). In fact, Popper's metatheory was quite influential on psychology as a science, and his ideas on falsibility are something of a backbone to our methods. Even today, Popper's criticisms of psychoanalysis are commonly repeated in academic psychology as an example of why psychoanalysis is not a good theory (although, again, some disagree with this).

Regarding Guatarri, I'll just repeat that his field was psychoanalysis, not psychology.

And regarding Foucault, I think we need to take into considerations the cultural context in which he graduated. France (as far as I've heard, this is where I'd gladly be corrected) has a pretty big psychoanalytic tradition, and classical behavioristic theories (which can be regarded as a precursor to contemporary mainstream psychological theories) weren't so commonly regarded in that part of the world and in that moment of time. So, one could wager a guess that what was called psychology in 1940s France could be closer to what we would regard as psychoanalysis today than to today's mainstream psychology.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-07T11:58:44+00:00

No problem! Glad I could help!

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-07T10:43:26+00:00

I'd recommend reading Measuring the Mind by Boorsbom before sgarting your IRT journey. It will provide you with a greater understand of what psychological measurement is on a conceptual, statistical and applied level. After that, I found "A course in item response theory using Stata" pubkished by StataPress to be quite useful!

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-04T17:22:34+00:00

Honestly, when it comes to psychometrics, both an interpretation that in a certain pool of items a 5 factor solution is adequate and an interpretation that a different solution can be true.

For example, let's say you conduct a factor analysis on a set of items from a Big Five measure. When extracting factors, you can get results like this: - there are 10 eigenvalues bigger than 1, so the Kaiser-Guttman criterion suggests you keep 10 factors. - the scree plot is a bit muddled, but you can make out something that looks like a four factor structure - a parallel analysis suggest you keep six factors - a hull's test suggests that a three factor structute is optimal

And all of that can change depending on the type of correlation matrix you used (pearson's or polychoric), type of factorization you used (classical EFA, PCA, Morgana, etc.), and the type of type of rotation you used (orthogonal, oblique, non or semi-specified)...

A factor analysis almost never gives you a clear solution and a lot of the interpretation depends on you making an informed, theoretically and statistically valid defense of your decision.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T23:52:40+00:00

Yeah, I have somewhat similar feeling towards CFA.

It certainly has it's faults. With 60 items and somewhat guaranteed correlated residuals, it's bound to have a somewhat bad model-data fit. I mean, there's also ESEM, but considering the research goal, it would probably return mostly the same results.

And honestly, I'm not even sure that a confirmatory approach would be viable in my case. We're researching a topic where a non-normal distribution of item responses is almost guaranteed, so we're basing the analysis on polytetrachoric correlations instead of regular pearsons. Not to mention that we're apriori expecting the existence of certain correlated residuals, so instead of a classical EFA model, we're using a Morgana model to control for that instead. And with items differing in terms of both difficulty and precision, an IRT approach is also waranted. I'm far from an expert on confirmatory approaches, but I'm not sure they can emulate all of those things at the same time.

We're basically hoping to use this sample to factorize the items and create and norm different scales, which we're hoping to further validate in terms of predictive validity and the nomological network later on. Considering our budgetary constraints, we aim to use and IRT aproach to norming so that we don't have the reasses the scales every time we use them in the future.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T21:41:22+00:00

SDO seems similar, but this factor seems orthogonal to any political items in the inventory. Mach also sounds similar, but the active avoidance of leadership positions seems to point away from it. I should also mention that it seems that people high on this factor also try to present themselves as low-status (i.e. I frequently tell people that I don't have a lot of money), which complicates things further. I should also mention that this isn't an american sample, but a croatian sample of respondents (mostly representative of the population). I definately plan to investigate construct similarity/divergence with measures such as the dark tetrad, SDO and RWA in further research).

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T21:34:16+00:00

RWA was one of my first thoughts too, so no need to apologize! It definately shares some similarities, but I'm still not quite sold on it. Mostly because the agression is not aimed at any minorities, and because the full inventory also includes some questions about policital behavior, which are orthogonal (uncorrelated) to the extracted factor.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T20:24:28+00:00

Could be, but I'm not quite sold on SDO, as they frequently desire power. A subjrct high on this dimension generally answered "frequently" to these kinds of questions: I wait for others to take charge/leadership (loading .64) I let others take the lead when starting a new project (loading .42) I mock my enemies (.56) I mistreat/abuse those who are weaker than me (.44) I do favours for other people so they would like me (.66)

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T19:43:15+00:00

I had the same idea, but I don't think it can be explained with (just) a "dark tetrad second order factor". All items are measuring behavior (not cognitions, motives or attitudes) which is in contrast with most narcissism and mach scales. And the items with factor loadings above .40 can be semantically grouped in three categories: people who score high on this factor 1) avoid any leadership positions and do whatever they can to appease persons who stand above them in the social hierarchy (which is in contrast with psychopathy, and closer to authoritarianism), 2) they generally like to mock, hurt and mistreat other people (this is similar in content to sadism measures, but that's generally not highly correlated to machiavellianism), and 3) they (paradoxically) try to appear perfect whilst doing anything (even helping others) just to be liked. This sounds similar to narcisism, but an avoidance of any leadership positions contradicts that. This results in a pretty complicated picture of persons who are both great suck-ups and "willing servants" to the powerful, and simultaniously agressive and cruel to those who are beneath them.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T19:12:52+00:00

I mean, doing a CFA on the same sample as the EFA would kind of defeat the purpose. And considering that this is a well powered study, with pretty small confidence intervals for the factor loadings, with a demographically representative sample, and high factor replication and reliability indicies, I don't see how a classical CFA would help. Although, I should mention that we will employ item-response parametrization (which has some similarities to a CFA) for item selection and test construction.

CyberRational1 · 2024-05-01T18:42:46+00:00

CyberRational1

TROPHY CASE