An interview
We recently talked with Wiebke Bleidorn, about her paper titled, “Longitudinal Experience‐Wide Association Studies—A Framework for Studying Personality Change”, which appeared in the May/June issue of EJP. Wiebke is professor at the Psychology department at UC Davis, California.
Read on to learn more about Wiebke’s work on studying personality change below!
Q: Hello Wiebke! Can you tell us a bit about the Personality Change Consortium that you are part of?
Over the past couple of years, personality development has become a hot topic. The number of talks and symposia on this topic are spiking, papers on personality development are filling our journals; chapters are being added to classic textbooks, and the field seems to generally agree that a thorough understanding of traits as both stable and changeable constructs is essential for personality science. At the same time, our field seemed to be stuck on important questions about the nature, sources, and processes of personality change. What drives personality change? How do changes in traits unfold? Can we change personality traits through intervention? Answers to these questions require theoretical and empirical work that largely goes beyond a single researcher's capacity and resources. It became clear that we need to bundle the expertise, resources, and skills of researchers to address these questions. With the help of an "expert meeting" grant from EAPP, Chris Hopwood and I founded the Personality Change Consortium (PCC), an international group of researchers committed to advancing our understanding of the sources, mechanisms, and consequences of personality change. Our goal is to share resources and develop collaborative projects amongst PCC members and other scholars in the field, inclusive of psychologists as well as experts in neighboring disciplines, to advance our understanding of personality development.
Q: What is the current paper about?
As mentioned earlier, the PCC originated with the insight that a comprehensive and more effective study of personality change will be too difficult and resource intensive for any single lab or individual researcher. In our paper, we lay out a framework for future research on personality development that highlights important areas of improvement, with the hope of spurring collaborative efforts that surpasses current standards of practice. Specifically, we describe four domains – timing, samples, measures, and experiments – that we see as critical elements of the next generation of research on personality change.
Q: Where do you see the field of personality psychology heading in the (near) future?
It follows from what I have said above that we envision more large-scale studies generated by personality researchers. Currently, there are quite a few large-scale studies, but these are typically done in the context of representative samples that were collected for other purposes. While these studies have revealed important insights about personality development, they were not designed to study this topic per se, and thus they are not well-equipped to answer many of the questions that interest us. Conversely, there are many excellent studies generated by personality researchers, but because of issues of funding and other resource constraints, these studies are typically small. The key, in our view, is putting these two things together: we hope to encourage the generation of large, sophisticated, longitudinal studies with the design elements described in this paper, for the expressed purpose of studying personality change.
Q: What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I can only speak for Chris and myself here - we like to ride our tandem, play with our poodle, and of course play with our kids Sullivan and Henry. Under normal circumstances, I would have said we like to travel, preferably to warm places by the Ocean. Obviously, things are a bit different this year…and we spend lots of time in our backyard garden or walking around Davis, which is actually a lovely place to be sequestered, all things considered.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers?
The first major goal of the PCC was to generate a set of foundational papers laying out our ideas for advancing personality change research. As a group, we now have four papers, including the one coming out in EJP, in which we do this. We are therefore moving into the second and more difficult goal of the PCC, which involves making good on some of the ideas in our initial papers. We see young researchers as essential for this goal, and will unveil some plans for promoting and learning from young scholars in the near future. Stay tuned!