Psychology: Confidence and Conscientiousness - Essay Example

? Psychology: Confidence Psychology: Confidence AIMs The human personality is a vital component of their existence, it plays a major role in the way they react to different situations. The human personality is mainly determined by their traits, traits are habits of thought emotions or behavior that take a certain pattern over time, they then stabilize and become a part of the individual such that they have a certain unique way to handle situations, this differs from one person to another (Myers, D. G. 2004, pp 38). The most common way of examining the human personality is by use of the trait theory; it can be described as a way of measuring traits of individuals. Gordon Allport, who was psychologist did a research about traits and came up with certain classifications of traits. According to him, central traits are those traits that are influential most to the personality of certain people; it plays a big role in determining the personality of an individual, most people share these types of traits. He also determined that secondary traits are those traits that are peripheral and are unique to most individuals (Wade, C., & Tavris, C. 2000. pp 103). Common traits are those traits that are mainly determined by the cultures of the individuals, these traits vary from one culture to another depending on the customs and traditions of the culture. He also talked about cardinal traits, which are those that appear so strongly in an individual. Allport found out that there are two major categories to look at when determining the personality of an individual. After Allaport many psychologists later came, most of them based their research on the traits of groups other than individuals. Single individual view of personality became known as an idiographic view, and group view of personality came to be known as nomothetic approach. In the beginning, psychologists came up with three major classes of human personalities; later other psychologists came to an agreement that there were five major classes of traits. Openness to experience is the first class of human personality classification; this involves the analysis of the cautious versus the cautious part of the mind. This class tends to look into the appreciation of certain aspects such as adventure and curiosity. It also involves many emotions, and creativity of an individual, their ability to imagine and come up with things. Extraversion is another factor of the big five traits, it involves the analysis of outgoing traits versus solitary personalities who seem to keep to themselves (Howard, P. J. & Howard, J. M. 2001, pp 98). This involves the traits of sociability and the behavior of certain individuals in the presence of certain groups of people. Conscientiousness is a trait that tends to examine the personalities between organization and carelessness. These entail the human nature to take duty and be responsible for their actions or types of work, organized individual are more dependable than those who are careless. The trait of agreeableness defines the aspects of compassionate people and unkind people, compassionate people are more cooperative whereas unkind people tend to be very suspicious and uncooperative. The last trait of the big five is the trait of neurotism. It examines the personalities of nervousness and confidence people who fall under this trait are easily annoyed and depressed. Neuroticism is about the degree of stability that one has over their emotions (Raad, B. Perugini, M. 2002, pp 67). The word confidence comes from a Greek word fidere, which means, “with trust”, confidence is the basis of any solid relationship, and this is because it inspires people to trust others since they always seem to have things under control. For trust to thrive there must be confidence. Confidence is a sub-trait of the trait of extraversion. This questionnaire aims at determining the ways of knowing if a person has the confidence trait or not. It includes questions that tend to test for confidence levels, the questionnaire mainly based on yes or no answers. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the validity and reliability of the designed personality trait based on factor analysis. Factor analysis refers to Statistical methods used to describe variability among the observed and correlated variables in terms of lower number of unobserved variables (factors). Factor analysis is believed to be useful with multiitem inventories designed to measure personality, attitudes and behaviors (Floyd.J & Widaman.F, 1995). QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN Questionnaire is the heart of any typical survey and as such the survey results predominantly depends on the questionnaire. Questionnaires should therefore be constructed in accordance to the best practices so as to minimize errors. Below is the questionnaire used in the survey, the questionnaire, which intended to measure person’s confidence as a trait consisted of 20 items. Each item of the questionnaire used a 5-point Likert scale that ranged from 1- Strongly Disagree to 5-Strongly Agree; 1. I enjoy being challenged by others. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 2. If a task is too hard I have no problem achieving the target. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 3. I believe that people are trustworthy. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 4. I believe that detail makes the difference. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 5. In a crisis situation I try not to panic and act as efficiently as possible. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 6. I believe that art and music are important and integral parts of life. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 7. I avoid taking part in challenges. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 8. I am not easily bothered by things and I accept people as they are. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 9. I avoid doing unnecessary work. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 10. I am not very interested in abstract ideas. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 11. I consider myself as the spark of the party. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 12. I do not believe that my contribution matters. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 13. I panic and become distressed in stressful situations. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 14. I would rather try and fail than quit in the middle of something. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 15. I am easily offended and am not afraid to respond to an insult. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 16. I dislike being criticized and choose to ignore it. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 17. I easily accept constructive critique. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 18. I do not like to draw attention to myself. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 19. I believe that people hide their intentions. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree 20. I believe that my life fulfils a purpose in the world. Strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 strongly agree A pilot study with 40 students from London Metroplitan University was conducted to check how many questions would retain until we found a reasonable number of questions (validity and reliability of the questionnaires). Reliability has to do with measurement of random error. Reliability indicates the accuracy or precision of the measuring instrument (Norland, 1990). A reliable questionnaire is one that is also valid and can produce the same results under the same conditions. Reliability is basically "the degree to which a test consistently measure whatever it is measuring" (Gay & Airasian, 2003, p. 141). A reliability analysis is essential when developing a research questionnaire because a research instrument lacking reliability cannot measure any variable better than chance alone (Hopkins, 1998). REPORT FINDINGS Questionnaire analysis: Factor analysis Descriptive Statistics Looking at the mean, one can conclude that the variable “If a task is too hard I have no problem achieving the target” is the most important variable that influences the confidence of a person. It has the highest mean of 4.55. At the same time the variable “I do not believe that my contribution matters” with a mean of 1.88 seems to be the least important variable that influences the confidence of a person. KAISER-MEYER-OLKIN (KMO) AND BARTLETT'S TEST The two tests measure strength of the relationship among the various variables. KMO measures the sampling adequacy and for a satisfactory factor analysis to proceed it should be greater than 0.5. For any pair with a value less than this, one variable should be dropped from the analysis. In a good model, the off-diagonal elements should all be very small (probably close to zero). Looking at the table below, the KMO measure is 0.458 which is below Kaiser’s (1974) recommendation of 0.5. As such, the evidence suggests that the sample size is less adequate to yield distinct and reliable factors. Bartlett's test also tests the strength of the relationship among variables. It tests the null hypothesis that the correlation matrix is an identity matrix. Identity matrix refers to a matrix in which all the diagonal elements are equal to one and all off diagonal elements equal to zero. It can be seen from the same table that the p-value=0.000 Read More