Personality
PSY/504
June 25,2012
Elisa Doebler-Irvine

Personality
Personality Is perceived differently by the general public and psychology professionals. Through examining the behaviors of the term psychologist view it a little differently. The contents of this essay will describe the definition of personality used by psychologist professionals today. Later, this essay will go in depth explaining the differences between case studies, correlation designs, quasi experimental designs, and true experiments. Each of these methods will be describes from what information they all provide and what advantages and disadvantages they hold.
Every individual has a different view of the term personality. Idealistically a definition is created by how people use the word within sentences of different structures. Philosophically speaking the term personality is defined by how the general public perceives and uses the word (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The general definition of personality consists of a combination of different characteristics or qualities that produce a subject’s distinctive character. Personality is built up of different qualities that can make someone interesting, different, and/or popular. It is defined as an enduring pattern of thought, feeling, and behaviors that are unique to each individual. Psychologist, however, have a much more in detail definition of personality. For instance psychologist addresses three issues when analyzing personality. These issues include the human universal, individual differences, and individual uniqueness perspectives (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The human universal study asks what is generally true of people, individual differences questions how people differ from one another, and the study of individual uniqueness questions how uniqueness can be described in a scientific manner (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). In general, psychologist refer to the term personality as psychological qualities that contribute to individual enduring and patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving that is distinctive in every individual (Cervone & Pervin, 2010).
Case studies are used to analyze every aspect of life and history. It is used to seek patterns and causes of behavior (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The disadvantages of case studies are that they are highly subjective and different to generalize results to longer populations. Correlation designs are statistical measurements of the relationship between two variables ranging from -1 to +1. A -1 indicated a perfect negative correlation which refers to one variable going up and the other going down (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). A +1 indicates a perfect positive correlation which means that both variables move in the same direction (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). Correlation designs allow for a simple observation of variables in their natural setting. For instance orders of births or genders are used in correlation designs. The disadvantage of this method is that they cannot manipulate the variable and control other factors, thus there is a major limitation in the ability to eliminate a third variable as an explanation to infer a direct link between variables. Quasi experimental designs, like to true experimental design, must meet two criteria; random assignments to participants of groups and manipulation of internal variable (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The quasi experimental design differs in the conception of there being no random assignments of participants to groups (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). An example of quasi experimental design would be a study where one examines the effects of respiratory functioning, You may have 2 packs a day smokers and 3 pack a day smokers in one’s experiment, but cannot assign them into specific groups. Due to this one cannot make a conclusion with a cause and effect. A true experimental design includes control groups and random assignment groups (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The researcher manipulates independent variables to observe the effects on same behavior or groups so that external factors can be controlled from influencing results (Cervone & Pervin, 2010). The benefit to the true experimental design is that it establishes a cause and effect.
The contents of this paper provide a description of personality by what the general public perceives of it and how psychologist view it. The essay discusses case studies, correlation designs, quasi experimental designs, and true experiments. These methods have been discussed of their differences to one another along with the information they provide to the examiner. Each method has been discussed of its advantages and disadvantages along with examples for demonstration.

References
Cervone, D., & Pervin, L.A. (2010) Personality: Theory and research (11th ed). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.