Integration and Domain Specificity of Response Styles: Towards a Better Understanding of a General Response Style
Keywords:
response styles, general factor, domain specificity, score correctionAbstract
We examined the meaning of a general response style that integrates acquiescent, extreme, midpoint, and socially desirable responding. A total of 5,457 Dutch residents (mainstreamers and Western and non-Western immigrant) were sampled. Self-report measures of the four response styles, values, personality, self-regulation, cognition, positive life outcomes, and political views were administered. Conventional, indirect measures of acquiescent, extreme, and midpoint responding were calculated. A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported a general response style factor with positive loadings of extreme and socially desirable responding, and negative loadings of acquiescent and midpoint responding with both self-report and indirect measures. This factor was most strongly associated with personality and cognition, and least with political views. The correction of the general response style factor had differential effects on the correlations between scales, with the most impact in more personally relevant domains. We advise against correcting for response styles in self-report psychological measures.
Downloads
References
Bachman, J. G., & O'Malley, P. M. (1984). Black-White differences in self-esteem: Are they affected by response styles? American Journal of Sociology, 90, 624–639. doi:10.2307/2779299
Byrne, B. M. (2001). Structural equation modeling with AMOS: Basic concepts, applications, and programming. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Cabooter, E. F. K. (2010). The impact of situational and dispositional variables on response styles with respect to attitude measures. Doctor in Applied Economic Sciences Dissertation, Ghent University, Ghent.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 116–131. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.42.1.116
Cronbach, L. J. (1950). Further evidence on response sets and test design. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 10, 3–31.
Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24, 349–354.
Diamantopoulos, A., Raeynolds, N. L., & Simintiras, A. C. (2006). The impact of response styles on the stability of cross-national comparisons. Journal of Business Research, 59, 925–935. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.03.001
Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction With Life scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71–75. doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa4901_13
Dudley, N. M., McFarland, L. A., Goodman, S. A., Hunt, S. T., & Sydell, E. J. (2005). Racial differences in socially desirable responding in selection contexts: Magnitude and consequences. Journal of Personality Assessment, 85, 50–64. doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa8501_05
Eid, M., & Rauber, M. (2000). Detecting measurement invariance in organizational surveys. uropean Journal of Psychological Assessment, 16, 20-30. doi:10.1027//1015–5759.16.1.20
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 348–362. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
He, J., & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2013). A general response style factor: Evidence from a multi-ethnic study in the Netherlands. Personality and Individual Differences, 55, 794–800. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2013.06.017
Jarvis, W. B. G., & Petty, R. E. (1996). The need to evaluate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 172–194. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.1.172
Krosnick, J. A. (1991). Response strategies for coping with the cognitive demands of attitude measures in surveys. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5, 213–236. doi:10.1002/acp.2350050305
Lalwani, A. K., Shrum, L. J., & Chiu, C.-y. (2009). Motivated response styles: The role of cultural values, regulatory focus, and self-consciousness in socially desirable responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 870–882. doi:10.1037/a0014622
Lockwood, P., Jordan, C. H., & Kunda, Z. (2002). Motivation by positive or negative role models: Regulatory focus determines who will best inspire us. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 854–864. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.854
Meiser, T., & Machunsky, M. (2008). The personal structure of personal need for structure: A mixture-distribution Rasch analysis. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 24, 27–34. doi:10.1027/1015-5759.24.1.27
Messick, S., & Jackson, D. N. (1961). Acquiescence and the factorial interpretation of the MMPI. Psychological Bulletin, 58, 299–304. doi:10.1037/h0043979
Musek, J. (2007). A general factor of personality: Evidence for the Big One in the five-factor model. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 1213–1233. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2007.02.003
Naemi, B. D., Beal, D. J., & Payne, S. C. (2009). Personality predictors of extreme response style. Journal of Personality, 77, 261–286. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00545.x
Ones, D. S., Viswesvaran, C., & Reiss, A. D. (1996). Role of social desirability in personality testing for personnel selection: The red herring. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 660–679. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.81.6.660
Paulhus, D. L. (1991). Measurement and control of response biases. In J. Robinson, P. Shaver & L. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological attitudes (Vol. 1, pp. 17–59). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Pauls, C. A., & Stemmler, G. (2003). Substance and bias in social desirability responding. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 263–275. doi:10.1016/s0191-8869(02)00187-3
Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Prinsceton, NY: Princeton University Press.
Smith, P. B. (2011). Communication styles as dimensions of national culture. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42, 216–233. doi:10.1177/0022022110396866
Triandis, H. C., & Gelfand, M. J. (1998). Converging measurement of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 118–128. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.1.118
Van de Vijver, F. J. R., & Leung, K. (1997). Methods and data analysis of comparative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Van Dijk, T. K., Datema, F., Piggen, A.-L. J. H. F., Welten, S. C. M., & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2009). Acquiescence and extremity in cross-national surveys: Domain dependence and country-level correlates. In A. Gari & K. Mylonas (Eds.), Quod erat demonstrandum: From Herodotus' ethnographic journeys to cross-cultural research (pp. 149–158). Athens: Pedio Books Publishing.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2016 Psihologia Resurselor Umane
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal,it also allows for use of the work for non-commercial purposes and if others remix, transform or build upon the works found in this journal they must distribute the contributions under the same licence as the original.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See: The Effect of Open Access).
