Critique of the act frequency approach to personality.

1 January 1989

journal article
Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Vol. 56 (2) , 234-245
https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.56.2.234

Abstract

Evaluates the the act frequency approach (AFA), noting that retrospective self-reports rather than behavioral acts are studied; act context and meaning are not considered; the AFA self-report inventories are incompletely developed and are psychometrically unsound; the AFA claim of absolute measurement of dispositions is insupportable; many of the self-report act statements used are technically unacceptable or conceptually unwarranted; the research agenda of the AFA primarily involves only "internal analyses" of self-report "act" inventories and indices and proposes the further creation of "act" inventories to index thousands of conceptually unorderable dispositions. Were the problems involved in the current implementation of the AFA to be resolved, various large conceptual problems presently besetting the approach then would have to be confronted.

Keywords

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