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. 2025 Jun;51(6):1078-1094.
doi: 10.1177/01461672231208499. Epub 2023 Nov 22.

Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality

Farid Anvari  1 , Noëlle Z Rensing  2 , Elise K Kalokerinos  3 , Richard E Lucas  4 , Iris K Schneider  1
Affiliations

Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality

Farid Anvari et al. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2025 Jun.

Abstract

Within-person variability in affect (e.g., Neuroticism) and personality have been linked to well-being. These are measured either by asking people to report how variable they are or to give multiple reports on the construct and calculating a within-person standard deviation adjusted for confounding by the person-level mean. The two measures are weakly correlated with one another and the links of variability with well-being depend on which measure researchers use. Recent research suggests that people's repeated ratings may be biased by response styles. In a 7-day study (N = 399) with up to five measurements per day, we confirmed that the measures of variability lacked sufficient convergent validity to be used interchangeably. We found only 1 significant correlation (of 10) between variability in repeated ratings of affect or personality and variability in repeated ratings of a theoretically unrelated construct (i.e., features of images). There was very little evidence supporting the response styles hypothesis.

Keywords: emotions; measurement; neuroticism; personality; variability.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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