"... And How About Now?": Effects of Item Redundancy on Contextualized Self-Reports of Personality

ABSTRACT A common method of studying cross‐situational variation in personality involves asking people to describe their behavior in several different contexts. Although this approach is intuitively appealing, it introduces a great deal of redundancy into the measurement process and may affect the interpretation of contextualized self‐reports. Specifically, when participants are asked the same questions repeatedly in a single questionnaire, they may be compelled to focus on how their behavior is different. We tested this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating the number of contexts that were included in a measure of role‐related personality. In 2 experiments (Study 1 N=377, Study 2 N=524), we found that multiple‐role questionnaires produced greater variation in trait levels across roles, larger differences between general and role‐specific ratings, and weaker correlations between general and role‐specific ratings than single‐role questionnaires. These findings illustrate how the measurement process can have an effect on the variability of responses to contextualized self‐reports.