Epstein Seymour
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
J Pers. 1983 Sep;51(3):360-392. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1983.tb00338.x.
Failure to appreciate the role that aggregation plays in increasing reliability and validity and in establishing the range of generalization of findings has resulted in misunderstandings about the stability of behavior across time and situations, and in the conduct of experiments that produce results that tend to be neither generalizable nor replicable. Appropriate aggregation can reduce error variance associated with the unrepresentativeness of individual stimuli, situations, occasions, judges, items of behavior, and subjects. Inappropriate aggregation can result not only in a loss of information but also in a reduction in reliability as well as validity. Different approaches to prediction with single items of behavior are discussed, and it is concluded that single items tend to be too unreliable and too narrow in scope to measure broad dispositions such as traits. A major emphasis is that behavior is often so highly situationally specific that unless this is taken into account by procedures such as aggregation over situations and/or occasions, or by the investigation of events that are so highly ego-involving that experimental effects dominate situation-ally unique effects, results will tend to be unreplicable or ungeneralizable, no matter what their level of statistical significance.
未能认识到聚合在提高可靠性和有效性以及确定研究结果的概括范围方面所起的作用，已导致对行为在不同时间和情境下的稳定性产生误解，并导致进行的实验所产生的结果往往既无法概括也无法复制。适当的聚合可以减少与个体刺激、情境、场合、评判者、行为项目和受试者的非代表性相关的误差方差。不适当的聚合不仅会导致信息丢失，还会降低可靠性和有效性。讨论了用单个行为项目进行预测的不同方法，并得出结论，单个项目往往过于不可靠且范围过于狭窄，无法测量诸如特质等广泛的倾向。一个主要的重点是，行为通常具有高度的情境特异性，除非通过诸如跨情境和/或场合的聚合等程序，或通过对那些高度涉及自我以至于实验效应主导情境独特效应的事件进行调查来加以考虑，否则无论其统计显著性水平如何，结果往往都无法复制或无法概括。
