Education and Human Development, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Center for Research on Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
J Pers Assess. 2020 Jan-Feb;102(1):10-21. doi: 10.1080/00223891.2018.1521418. Epub 2019 Jan 11.
Within-person couplings play a prominent role in psychological research and previous studies have shown that interindividual differences in within-person couplings predict future behavior. For example, stress reactivity-operationalized as the within-person coupling of stress and positive or negative affect-is an important predictor of various (mental) health outcomes and has often been assumed to be a more or less stable personality trait. However, issues of reliability of these couplings have been largely neglected so far. In this work, we present an estimate for the reliability of within-person couplings that can be easily obtained using the user-modifiable R code accompanying this work. Results of a simulation study show that this index performs well even in the context of unbalanced data due to missing values. We demonstrate the application of this index in a measurement burst study targeting the reliability and test-retest correlation of stress reactivity estimates operationalized as within-person couplings in a daily diary design. Reliability and test-retest correlations of stress reactivity estimates were rather low, challenging the implicit assumption of stress reactivity as a stable person-level variable. We highlight key factors that researchers planning studies targeting interindividual differences in within-person couplings should consider to maximize reliability.
个体内耦合在心理学研究中起着重要作用，先前的研究表明，个体内耦合的个体间差异可以预测未来的行为。例如，应激反应——表现为应激和积极或消极情绪的个体内耦合——是各种（心理）健康结果的重要预测因素，并且通常被假定为或多或少稳定的人格特质。然而，到目前为止，这些耦合的可靠性问题在很大程度上被忽视了。在这项工作中，我们提供了一种使用随附本工作的用户可修改 R 代码轻松获得的个体内耦合可靠性的估计。模拟研究的结果表明，即使在由于缺失值导致的数据不平衡的情况下，该指标也能很好地发挥作用。我们在一项测量爆发研究中应用了该指标，该研究旨在确定在日常生活日记设计中作为个体内耦合来操作的应激反应估计的可靠性和重测相关性。应激反应估计的可靠性和重测相关性都相当低，这对应激反应作为稳定的个体水平变量的隐含假设提出了挑战。我们强调了计划针对个体内耦合中的个体间差异进行研究的研究人员应该考虑的关键因素，以最大限度地提高可靠性。
