Research Interests
Broadly, I am interested in personality change, development, and prediction (yes, I promise they are different from one another). However, my research regularly integrates all three areas - making it somewhat difficult to place it in a single category at times!
Brief notes on my general views for personality research:
When I say "personality," I intentionally mean that in a very broad sense – personality is much more than just mean-levels of traits!
Personality is also more than traits in general, but I do typically abide by a trait perspective in my research.
For me, "trait" is also broadly defined
For practical (and realistic) purposes, and with any niche preferences regarding semantics aside, I consider most relatively stable individual difference constructs that capture someone's typical thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to be "traits"
The Big Five are the traits I most often look at, but impulsivity, sensation-seeking, self-esteem, depression, life goals, and individual temperament traits have also been the focus of my work
Also, while I acknowledge the nomothetic versus idiographic debate and ways of conceptualizing & conducting research on personality, I prefer to view these matters from a variable- versus person-centered perspective.
Some research questions necessitate the use of a variable- versus person-centered approach (and vice versa)
However, I believe it is necessary to conduct research from both perspectives to fully understand personality
Ultimately, the common theme of my research is using longitudinal data to examine the nature, development, and implications of personality traits from both a variable- and person-centered perspective.
For all of my research, though, I'm interested not only in the average, sample-level trends or associations we see in the data, but more importantly in the individual differences that emerge for these effects. That is, I wish to answer questions such as:
How are individual people changing over time?
What is the degree of heterogeneity for patterns of personality development within a sample?
Why do traits only sometimes predict outcomes – can this discrepancy be explained by biological, environmental, or other personality individual difference variables?
How are multiple personality individual differences related and what is their collective impact on people's development and life circumstances? For instance, do they interact to foster unique patterns of change or influence how personality is associated with an outcome in a nuanced way?
What are the underlying causes of the many different individual differences in personality, and do they differ across the various metrics?
Moreover, I am curious about the impact that different analytical and methodological choices have on subsequent inferences. I tend to take a data-driven approach to my research, so understanding the ramifications of how researchers go about using data to answer their questions is of huge interest to me. Examples of questions I have for this work are:
What is the best way to quantify the many different individual difference metrics?
What are the consequences of failing to account for the many sources of personality variance on the model-estimated personality trajectories and outcome associations?
What is the best way to model changes in personality for a given research question?
What is the best way to specify a model in order to accurately test many associations of interest between personality and an outcome over time?
If you're interested in reading more about a specific area of research, or if you wish to see a representative list of selected papers I've done that are relevant to that given area, feel free to click on that topic below :-)
Specific Areas
Personality Change
Personality Development
Personality Prediction