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. 2021 Jun 4:12:667165.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.667165. eCollection 2021.

Testing the Associations Between Adult Playfulness and Sensation Seeking: A SEM Analysis of Librarians and Police Officers

Kay Brauer  1 , Tiziana Scherrer  1 , René T Proyer  1
Affiliations

Testing the Associations Between Adult Playfulness and Sensation Seeking: A SEM Analysis of Librarians and Police Officers

Kay Brauer et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Playfulness is an understudied personality trait in adults. We examined the relationships between facets of adult playfulness and sensation seeking (SS) in distant vocational groups, namely, librarians (N = 339) and police officers (N = 399). First, manifest and latent group comparisons (measurement invariance [MI] analysis) showed that police officers were higher in SS than librarians, while we found no group differences for playfulness. Second, structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses showed that playfulness was widely positively related to SS, and findings were replicated across groups. However, the effects were of small to moderate size, and playfulness and SS shared between 4 and 22% variance. Our findings indicate that playfulness is not redundant with SS. Our study extends the understanding of adult playfulness by clarifying its overlap and distinctiveness from SS.

Keywords: OLIW; adult playfulness; librarians; measurement invariance; police; sensation seeking.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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