An article in the New York Times today highlights some of the particular challenges of psychosocial research. The article discusses the challenges of personality analysis, specifically as it applies to research of generations. Is it possible to analyze and assess a collective generational personality? Are there flaws in how researchers try to measure personality, behavior and attitude?
Measuring attitude is a difficult task, because even at its best, you have what the participant says and some sort of scale or means of interpreting what it means. There is a lot of room for error: the participant may just say what he thinks the researcher wants to hear, the participant may says what is socially desirable, the researcher may interpret the responses incorrectly or the researcher may think he is measuring one thing when he is actually measuring something else. This is why different mechanisms for validating behavioral scales are so important. The work is extremely valuable in that it can teach us something about ourselves and how we approach our world. But it is indeed a challenge.
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