Modeling the effects of within-person characteristic and goal-level attributes on personal project pursuit over time

The current study aims to overcome methodological constraints of previous goal pursuit research by exploring how people simultaneously rely upon person-level characteristic adaptations and unique goal-level attributes to pursue their personal projects. Undergraduate participants identified 10 projects they would pursue over an academic quarter and rated project meaningfulness, effort exerted, patience employed, and progress satisfaction at five time points. Multilevel structural equation models revealed the relative influence of person-level and project-level attributes on project appraisals. Person-level adaptations accounted for a large portion of variance in project pursuit appraisals, though significant project-specific trends were found over time as well, including mutual positive cross-lag influences between meaning, patience, and effort, and a negative predictive effect of progress satisfaction on meaning.     

Participatory action research: towards (non-ideal) epistemic justice in a university in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the possibilities for promoting epistemic justice in a South African university setting through a participatory action-based photovoice research project in which university researchers worked alongside undergraduate students with no prior experience of doing research. The student voices are employed to understand how learning as capability development and agency expansion can advance epistemic justice in a university setting of hierarchical relationships that make participatory action research challenging. The paper considers how, in this project, spaces of epistemic democracy intersected with the expansion of multidimensional functionings, resulting in more epistemic justice for the student-researchers. The paper considers the possibilities for change through a participatory project toward promoting epistemic justice at the individual level. It also explores some criticisms of the limits of such individual development in the face of structural challenges.     

‘Grandpa,Do You Like Roller Coasters?’: Identifying Age‐Appropriate Personality Indicators

Personality development research heavily relies on the comparison of scale means across age. This approach implicitly assumes that the scales are strictly measurement invariant across age. We questioned this assumption by examining whether appropriate personality indicators change over the lifespan. Moreover, we identified which types of items (e.g. dispositions, behaviours, and interests) are particularly prone to age effects. We reanalyzed the German Revised NEO Personality Inventory normative sample (N = 11,724) and applied a genetic algorithm to select short scales that yield acceptable model fit and reliability across locally weighted samples ranging from 16 to 66 years of age. We then examined how the item selection changes across age points and item types. Emotion‐type items seemed to be interchangeable and generally applicable to people of all ages. Specific interests, attitudes, and social effect items—most prevalent within the domains of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness—seemed to be more prone to measurement variations over age. A large proportion of items were systematically discarded by the item‐selection procedure, indicating that, independent of age, many items are problematic measures of the underlying traits. The implications for personality assessment and personality development research are discussed. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology