Within-person variation in psychological qualities and their assessment: Follow up on 30-day project

Lecture 8, Psych 350 - R. Chris Fraleyhttp://www.yourpersonality.net/psych350/fall2012/

Project # 2

• One of the goals of your 30-day within-person project is to learn more about how psychological qualities you care about (a) vary within your own life and (b) covary (i.e., correlate) with other qualities of interest.

What should I do next?

• There are two key steps involved in working with your data

– First, you need to extract/download your data.– Second, you need to analyze it.

• We’ll discuss this process today. Moreover, in labs this week, you’ll get direct practice with each of these steps.

Copy all to clipboard and paste to a text file

Import

• Once you save the text file, you can import it into Excel or SPSS using the text import wizard.

• You can use the same procedure/process we described previously for your web-based surveys.– Import as a comma-delimited file (commas [not tabs or

spaces] are used to separate one piece of information from the next)

– If given the option for headers or “variable labels on the first row”, select “yes”

This is a screenshot of what my data for a mood questionnaire look like after importing into Excel

• For starters, you’ll probably find it easiest to import your data for each yourpersonality module separately.

• For example, if you have a module for “mood,” one for “weight,” and one for “coffee consumption,” you’ll probably find it most useful to save each of the three data files separately.

• It will be easier to combine three separate files after the fact than to combine them from the start.

• You can easily examine the means, SDs, and even trajectories over time for each variable once you import those variables into your program.

Correlations

• One of the challenges in within-person research is that the various assessments are not always taken at the same time (literally speaking).

• Example with mood data.

• Thus, each observation of X needs to be paired (if possible) and an observation for Y.

• The yourpersonality.net program will attempt to facilitate this process. However, it is valuable to try it “by hand” to fully understand some of the complexities involved.

Red = paired aggregated values for the x-varaible

Blue = paired aggregated values for the y-varaible

These values can then be copied into Excel or SPSS to compute correlations.