Rank-order consistency and profile stability of self- and informant-reports of personal values Henrik Dobewall, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, SPAIN;

Dobewall & Aavik: Longitudinal stability of other-rated values

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Rank-order consistency and profile stability of self- and informant-

reports of personal values

Henrik Dobewall, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, SPAIN; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FINLAND; [email protected]

Toivo Aavik, University of Tartu, Tartu, ESTONIA

ECP2015 Milano, Room U6-08, July 8th from 11.35 am to 1.25 pm08/07/15


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Content

• General remarks on informant-reports• Rare use of other-rated personal values• Aims• Methods• Meta-analysis of rank-order stability in values-self• 3-year rank-order and ipsative stability estimates of

values-other vs. values-self• Predictive validity of intra-individual profile stability

for psychological adjustment • Conclusions

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General remarks on informant-reports

• Self-reports are potentially biased: Participants may respond in a socially desirable (Schwartz et al., 1997) or self-serving (Christopher & Schlenker, 2004) way and/or have a tendency to apply diverse response styles (He et al., 2014)

• An alternative is to assess a person’s social representation as held by close and knowledgeable others, such as, good friends, family members, or partners

• Further, informant-reports add unique insights about a person and may have incremental predictive validity for daily behavior (Vazire & Mehl, 2008)

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Rare use of other-rated personal values I

• The use of other-ratings in value research is relatively scarce (for exceptions see Lee et al., 2009; Rentfrow & Gosling , 2006; Paryente & Orr, 2010)

• Why? Personal values might be too privately held personal concerns (McAdams, 1995) or “too individually subjective” (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004, p. 359) to be judged by others

• Rokeach (1973) and Schwartz (1992) both suggest that it is difficult for others to infer a person’s values because a value may be expressed in a variety of behaviours and any single behaviour may express multiple values.

• Moreover, values refer to motivation, not to action, so observers must infer them indirectly

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Rare use of other-rated personal values II

• On the contrary, Dobewall et al. (2014) found that knowledgeable informants can, indeed, make quite accurate ratings of their target’s values (i.e., self-other agreement)

• Dobewall et al. (under review LAID) showed that other-rated values can be used to substitute and complement self-reports of values in explaining individual differences in academic achievement

• Yes-saying (MRAT-other) predicted yes-doing (participation in follow-up)

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Aims of the current study• 1) To examine if informant-reports of values

are no less stable across time than self-rated values (as meta-analytically reviewed and within the same sample) Making values-other a reliable source of information about a person’s personality

• 2) To test the predictive validity of the temporal stability of people’s value profiles (self- and other-rated) for psychological adjustment

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Four orthogonal forms of change (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000)

• Change in terms of mean-level (or normative) development refers to increases or decreases in value priorities of most people as they grow older (e.g., Dobewall et al., under review IJP)

• Researchers have also studied individual differences in value change (e.g., Lonnqvist et al., 2013) and the structure of value change (Bardi et al., 2009)

In the current study, …• 1) we are interested in the extent to which the relative

position of a person within a sample changes (rank-order consistency)

• 2) as well as in the stability of value hierarchies within the same individual (ipsative consistency)

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Profile stability and psychological adjustment

• Finally, personality theory (e.g., Roberts et al. 2001)

has proposed that “maturity is related to changes toward a desirable endpoint and that the likelihood of personality change diminishes as individuals come closer to that endpoint” (Klimstra et al., 2010, p. 1180)

• Profile stability has a reciprocal relationship with psychological adjustment

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ParticipantsSelf-reports:• The initial survey (T1) – conducted in 2011 (Dobewall et al. 2014) – consisted of

96 informant- and 101 self-reports of undergraduate students• In 2014 (T2), we invited the (now former) students via email and/or

www.facebook.com to do a follow-up online survey • 53 participants (7 male, 46 female; mean age 29.3 (SD=8.7) years) accepted

the invitation

Informant-reports:• We emphasized that it would be an advantage if the informants were the

same as at T1. At T2, 71.2 percent of the informants were new (30.9 percent male; average age 33.1 (SD=12.6) years)

• In 14 out of the total of 41 cases, two other-ratings were available, which were averaged

• The majority of informants (T2) were friends (55.9 percent), but many were spouses (17.6 percent), children (13.2 percent), or girl- or boyfriends (8.8 percent) of the targets

• The average length of acquaintance was 13.4 years (SD=10.6), with the majority of the informants seeing the target at least once a week

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http://www.facebook.com/


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Personal values

• The 21-item version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), which is included in the core questionnaire of the European Social Survey (www.europeansocialsurvey.org/), was used.

• Participants had to decide how much the person described was like them (self-rated form) or like the target (informant form)

• In order to correct for differences in peoples’ tendency to respond in different ways we subtracted the average rating a rater gives to all value items from each raw PVQ item before aggregating them into the ten specific value types

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http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/


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Adjustment variable

• Diener et al’s. (1985) five-item Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was administered at T2

• SWLS was developed to access overall cognitive evaluations of a person’s life

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Meta-analysis of rank-order stability in values-self

• Most commonly reported for personal values is rank-order consistency (Bardi et al., 2009; Bardi et al. 2014;

Lonnqvist et al. 2011; Schwartz, 2005, Sundberg, 2014), a stability estimate assessed by test-retest correlations

• We report the weighted mean effect size across 12 published samples

• Time gap was the only significant moderator of a study’s average rank-order consistency (not age group, sample N, or PVQ vs. SVS)

• R²=0.88, F (4, 7) = 6.279, p = .018

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Rank-order consistency of personal values

Power

Achiev

emen

t

Hedon

ism

Stimula

tion

Self-D

irect

ion

Univer

salis

m

Benev

olenc

e

Tradit

ion

Confo

rmity

Secur

ity

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

Weighted mean (meta-anslysis; 14 months)

3-year self

3-year other

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Difference between average correlations across the 10 types

Self-rated Other-rated0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

Meta-analysis3-year

• Self-rated values were in average not significantly less stable across time than in our meta-analysis (Z=-1.35, p=.17)

• The average rank-order consistency was, however, significantly lower in informant-reports of values (Z=-2.12, p=.03)

• More importantly, the average rank-order consistency was lower in values-other, but not significantly so when compared to values-self (Z=-0.75, p=.45)

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Overall and distinctive profile stability

• Profile (stability) correlations (Furr, 2008) are far less often assessed within-individual ranking of the ten types

• Surprising, as personal values develop their meaning by their ‘relative’ importance within a person (Gollan & Witte, 2014; Schwartz, 1992)

• The overall profile consistency includes a component common to the average profile within a population

• Several authors (e.g., Klimstra et al., 2010), furthermore, point to the importance of distinctive or unique aspects of one’s personality at T1 and the distinctive aspects of the personality of that same person at T2 gained by z-standardization within rater

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3-year ipsative consistency estimates of self- and other-rated value profiles and their correlation with the SWLS

• Next, we computed the overall and distinct profile stability scores for each individual

• Neither the (average) overall (Z=-0.62, p=.54) nor the distinctive (Z=1.14, p=.25) consistency of values-other were less stable than for values-self

• Finally, we correlated the obtained ipsative consistency scores with our adjustment variable

• The overall (only self-rated) and distinct profile (self- and other-rated) consistencies of personal values both correlated significantly with a targets life-satisfaction at T2

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Self-reports Informant-reports

M (SD) SWLS M (SD) SWLS

N = 53 46 41 39

Overall

stability.67 (.28) .28* .59 (.31) -.06

Distinctive

stability.52 (.34) .30* .32 (.38) .31**

Note. Marked correlation coefficients are significant at *p<.10, **p<.05, or at ***p<.01, two-tailed.


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Conclusions

• It is not only the self-image of a person that is rather resistant to change. The presented results imply that how others see you (i.e., a person’s social representation) might also change less with time than one would expect

• This implies that values-other can serve as a reliable measure of a person’s personality adding unique information about the target

• Note that many of the informants were not the same at T2 as at T1. In line with earlier research (e.g., Laidra et al., 2006), however, we do not have any indication if the longitudinal stability estimates of other-ratings of personal values were strongly affected by the use of both new and old informants

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Conclusions• We found that it is beneficial for an individual to be

consistent in his or her hierarchy of values• When individuals have reached a temporally stable value

profile, they tend to report more positive and less negative psychological outcomes It is likely satisfaction also increases values stability

• It is especially interesting that, if close others think that another person consistently holds a unique set of values, then these targets also scored higher on the SWLS

• Note, self- and informant- reports of personality traits were available for direct comparison (not presented here due to time limitations)

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THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

Contact: [email protected]

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mailto:[email protected]


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Meta-analysis of rank-order stability in values-self

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Data from Schwartz 2005 Bardi et al 2009

Lonnqvist et al 2011 Bardi et al 2013

Sundberg 2014

Weighted mean CI 95%

Values measure PVQ PVQ SVS PVQ SVS PVQ SVS PVQ SVS PVQ SVS PVQTime lack in months 1 1,5 1,5 24 3 9 12 19 9 18 24 6 14 (-) (+)N = 26 157 205 870 119 807 129 145 63 151 196 129 250

Power0,94 0,77 0,75 0,58 0,70 0,66 0,64 0,52 0,53 0,52 0,50 0,65 0,62 0,55

0,70

Achievement0,93 0,82 0,74 0,63 0,62 0,61 0,50 0,63 0,57 0,44 0,34 0,64 0,65 0,56 0,7

4Hedonism 0,67 0,65 0,70 0,65 0,60 0,64 0,53 0,53 0,67 0,58 0,49 0,61 0,62 0,58 0,6

6Stimulation

0,87 0,76 0,76 0,62 0,67 0,65 0,68 0,41 0,60 0,40 0,50 0,74 0,65 0,57 0,73

Self-Direction 0,79 0,70 0,71 0,53 0,64 0,58 0,54 0,49 0,70 0,55 0,44 0,72 0,63

0,57 0,70

Universalism 0,91 0,75 0,70 0,64 0,76 0,62 0,70 0,53 0,76 0,60 0,58 0,75 0,71 0,65 0,7

7Benevolence

0,84 0,62 0,76 0,50 0,48 0,60 0,65 0,37 0,59 0,44 0,48 0,65 0,60 0,52 0,67

Tradition 0,90 0,80 0,76 0,66 0,66 0,66 0,53 0,63 0,82 0,63 0,50 0,47 0,68 0,61 0,7

6Conformity

0,77 0,72 0,77 0,59 0,70 0,68 0,50 0,54 0,66 0,49 0,45 0,66 0,64 0,58 0,70

Security 0,81 0,70 0,82 0,59 0,57 0,58 0,53 0,46 0,12 0,53 0,39 0,53 0,57 0,46 0,6

7Average across the ten types

0,84 0,73 0,75 0,60 0,64 0,63 0,58 0,51 0,60 0,52 0,47 0,64 0,64 0,560,71

Documents

Rank-order consistency and profile stability of self- and informant-reports of personal values Henrik Dobewall, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, SPAIN;