Subject Code & Title : HPS307/791 Personality Lab Report
Words Count : 2,200 words
has four main aims:
1.Understand the major theoretical approaches used to explain consistent
patterns in thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.
This is important since these theories underlie the major approaches used to treat clients in clinical and health-related contexts and are also relevant to understanding behaviour in other settings such as organisations.
HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

2.Be able to apply these theories to solve realistic problems.
It is important that you have some understanding of how to apply theoretical frame works in a way that allows you to gain insights into behaviours you may want to alter.

3.Develop your analytic and communication skills.
Research has shown that both employers and recent graduates rate graduate skills (especially communication skills) as one of the most important factors affecting employ ability. Also, many of you want to move into fourth year and then postgraduate programs. Analytic and communication skills (especially written) are very important to
success in these courses, which have a substantial thesis component.

4.Understand how personality inventories are used to assess personality.
Like almost all constructs that we study in psychology, personality is a not a physical ‘thing’ that is possible to objectively measure. Hence, in order to try to measure something we cannot see, we make scales that are tested on big populations and hopefully feel reasonably confident that they are measuring what we think they are measuring. Understanding the psychometric properties of different scales, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, is an important part of being able to decide what scale, if any, you use in clinical practice or a research design.

The readings and assignment tasks are designed to not only improve your application, analytic, and writing skills in the context of personality theory, but also your interest in the subject matter. We hope that this will help you perform well on the assessment tasks, but more importantly, that it will teach you important skills that will help you in your next challenge, regardless of whether you enter the workforce or continue to do further study.

Please note that there is a comprehensive FAQs document in the Assessment folder in Cloud Deakin. If your question is not answered in this document, please check the FAQs.

Overview of Assessment Tasks
The assessment tasks for HPS307/791consist of:
• Assessment 1: Lab report (45% of overall grade)
• Assessment 2: Personality Profile report (25% of overall grade)
• Assessment 3: Examination (30% of overall grade)

Two major features of this unit are that we (a) base your AT 1 lab report on real data that we collect at the start of trimester, and (b) we return your own personality profile data to you for use in AT2. We hope that this will help you feel connected to the assessments and be inspired to delve deeply into understanding your own personality as well as the processes involved in understanding personality more generally.

We will help you develop the skills required for your assessment tasks in the seminar stream, and we encourage you to take advantage of the seminars to your fullest ability.

Data for AT 1 & AT 2
We need to collect data for your lab report and your personality profile report, so we would like you to consider completing a survey about personality and some additional outcome measures (described below). This aspect of the unit is entirely voluntary. If you do not wish to complete the survey, the data you use for AT2 will be that of a made-up person (there is no advantage or disadvantage to this, though perhaps it may not be as interesting as using your own data). There will be a Plain Language Statement at the start of the survey which explains that you are able to contribute your data to ongoing research in this area if you would like to. You have no obligation whatsoever to consent to contributing your data. If you decline to have your data pooled for research purposes, it will be deleted at the end of T3 (i.e., after your assessment tasks are completed and marked). If you consent to contributing your data, it will be anonymised
before being added to a larger data set. The data may be used in journal publications, and much of the past HPS307/791 data has been published in personality journals. There is no compulsion to allow your de-identified data to be used in this way, and the unit team, including the Unit Chair, will not know if you have elected to contribute your data or not. It is wholly your decision.

In addition to providing you with your own data, we have developed a methodology to enable us to give you other people’s assessment of your personality. This aspect of AT 2 is always interesting and sometimes enlightening, but importantly it is a really good way to help you develop a first-hand understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of personality testing. At the end of your survey, you will have an opportunity to invite
three people who know you really well to complete the same personality inventories that you did, however the questions they answer will be asking about how they see you. That means we can give you personality data as you see yourself, and an averaged profile of how other people see you (i.e., averaged across the three people who have completed the personality inventory for you). Will they be the same or different? What does it mean if other people do not see you the way you see yourself? These are the
sorts of really interesting questions that can come out of the HPS307/791 assessment process!

In order to protect relationships, we will give you your other-rater data back as an averaged profile. That is, you will get one set of scores for all three other-raters. This is to ensure that your other-raters feel free to answer the questions about you truthfully, as they will know that you will not be able to see how they rated you. Please encourage your other-raters to answer the questions honestly. It is quite possible, in fact probable, that the people who love or care for you may alter their responses about your personality in a socially desirable way if they know you will see what they said!

Before you enter the other-raters’ email addresses in the survey, please contact each person you would like to nominate and ask them if they mind completing the survey. You can reassure them that they should answer the questions honestly, and that you will not ever know what their actual responses were (because they will be averaged with two other people’s responses). This aspect of the assessment is a big undertaking and involves a lot of planning and coordination on our part and on yours, but it does provide you with some really interesting data to sink your teeth into. If your other- raters have any questions that you are not sure how to answer, please feel free to email the HPS307 or HPS791 in boxes.

Note: The survey will have items that measure additional outcomes including well- being, intelligence, self-awareness, and problematic smartphone use. Here is why we have these other variables in the survey:

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

The personality, motivation to lead, and competitiveness data will form the basis of the
lab report. The T3 cohort is typically quite small, so we asked T2 students to complete

these additional items to provide a robust sample size for the T3 cohort. The self-
awareness data were used by the T2 cohort for their lab report. The well-being, and

smart phone use scales are a follow-up from the 2020 cohort. The 2020 lab report looked at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on well-being, and whether personality traits were related to how people were coping. We would very much like to follow the well-being of our students in this semi-post-COVID-19 (?) environment. The intelligence data will be used in our seminars and forms part of AT2 for the HPS791 students.

We will return your scores for any and all of the scales that you complete as we know that students find this information interesting. In HPS307/791 we are conducting genuine, publishable research – nothing here is contrived for assessment purposes only. You can even read some of the published personality research that past cohorts have engaged with. We hope that engaging with a real research project, in real time,with real data that will contribute to the personality literature will ignite your interest in research!

1.Lab Report :
This research investigates how the Big 5 personality factors are associated with the motivation to lead and competitiveness, and how and motivation to lead and competitiveness are associated with one another.

1.1 The research topic
In this study, we will consider the motivation to lead and competitiveness, and how both these individual differences are related to the Big 5 personality factors. You will learn about the trait perspective in week 2, so we will not go into any detail about the Big 5 here. One of your starter references (De Young et al., 2007) will also help you to understand the Big 5 personality inventory used in this study.

Motivation to Lead:
There are three dimensions in the overall motivation to lead construct, but we are focussed only on affective-identity motivation to lead, which we will simply refer to as the motivation to lead.

We know from previous research that the Big 5 personality factors are correlated with the motivation to lead, and one of your starter references (Badura et al., 2020) will help with understanding the strength and direction of these associations.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

Competitiveness:
We used a multidimensional scale (Orosz et al., 2018) that measures four dimensions of competitive orientation:

• lack of interest toward competition
• hypercompetitiveness
• anxiety-driven competition avoidance
• self-developmental competitiveness

A range of previous studies have developed measures of general competitiveness, some of which have revealed correlations with Big 5 personality factors. You will need to search the literature to understand what we know about these associations found in previous research.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

Putting them together:
There may be theoretical reasons as to why the motivation to lead and general competitiveness may be related. For instance, those who are motivated to lead may be partly driven to pursue leadership roles due to their competitiveness, and those with an aversion to leadership roles may be hindered by their dislike of the competitiveness that may be involved in attaining such positions.

Remember that we are using a multidimensional measure of competitiveness, and the four different dimensions may have differing associations with personality and the motivation to lead. Part of the challenge of this lab report is choosing a dimension of competitiveness to focus on and considering how it may be linked to personality and the motivation to lead. How you wish to build a case for the relationship between these constructs is up to you, but the more you can make use of the literature to build this argument, the better.

An important step is to develop an understanding of what the Big 5 factors are. All students will need to choose one Big 5 factor to focus their report on, but HPS791 students will also need to consider the aspects of the Big 5 factor they choose. Which Big 5 factor you choose for your lab report is up to you, but you will need to think about how each factor might be related to the motivation to lead and the four dimensions of competitiveness.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

Based on these considerations, you should choose the dimension of competitiveness that may have an association with your chosen Big 5 factor. You will then need to think about how the motivation to lead and your chosen dimension of competitiveness relate to one another. Thinking about how motivation to lead relates to your chosen dimension of competitiveness may be guided by what you know or can predict about
how each of these constructs are related to your chosen Big 5 factor.

We will spend time talking through these ideas in our seminars, but you will also need to read relevant journal articles and apply your understanding of the unit content to these questions.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

Hypotheses
HPS307 students will formulate three hypotheses for AT 1, while HPS791 students will formulate five. Your hypotheses should be guided by the following research questions:

HPS307:
1) How does your chosen Big 5 personality factor relate to the motivation to lead?
2) How does your chosen Big 5 personality factor relate to your chosen
competitiveness dimension?
3) How does the motivation to lead relate to your chosen competitiveness dimension?

HPS791:
Choose one Big 5 personality factor and consider how the overall factor and its aspects relate to the motivation to lead and your chosen competitiveness dimension, thereby creating five hypotheses:
1) How does your chosen Big 5 personality factor relate to the motivation to lead?
2) Which aspect of your chosen Big 5 personality factor will have the strongest relationship with the motivation to lead?
3) How does your chosen Big 5 personality factor relate to your chosen
competitiveness dimension?
4) Which aspect of your chosen Big 5 personality factor will have the strongest relationship with your chosen competitiveness dimension?
5) How does the motivation to lead relate to your chosen competitiveness dimension?

Survey Information—AT 1 and AT 2
We will use the following questionnaires in our survey – they feed into both AT 1 and AT 2 (see notation beside each reference). You are welcome to look up the associated papers – the references are at the end of this document. You can copy and paste information from below, but you may also like to edit and enhance them a little and,where appropriate, format it in APA7 style. Remember to only include the scales we used for AT 1 data in your materials section.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

i. Big Five Aspects Scale
The BFAS is a 100-item self-report inventory that provides a measure of the Big 5 factors—Neuroticism, Extra version, Conscientiousness,Agreeableness, and Openness to experience. It also measures 10 aspects, two per factor. Items are answered on a five- point Likert scale, ranging from 1= ‘Strongly disagree’ to 5 = ‘Strongly agree’.

ii. Affective-Identity Motivation to Lead Scale
The Affective-Identity Motivation to Lead Scale is a nine-item self-report scale that measures the extent to which a person is motivated to lead. Items are scored on a five- point response scale ranging from 1 = ‘Strongly disagree’ to 5 = ‘Strongly agree’.

iii. Multidimensional Competitive Orientation Inventory
The Multidimensional Competitive Orientation Inventory is a 12-item self-report scale that measures four dimensions of competitiveness: lack of interest toward competition, hypercompetitiveness, anxiety-driven competition avoidant, and self-developmental competitiveness. Items are scored on a six-point response scale ranging from 1 = ‘Not true to me at all’ to 6 = ‘Completely true to me’.

iv. HEXACO Personality Inventory
This 100-item inventory measures the six factors of Honesty-humility, Emotionality, Extra version, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. It also measures the facets that underpin each factor. Items are answered on a five-point Likert scale,ranging from 1= ‘Strongly Disagree’ to 5 = ‘Strongly Agree’

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

v. The International Cognitive Ability Resource
The ICAR is a public-domain assessment of cognitive ability. Items assess a range of cognitive domains including (but not limited to) matrix reasoning, letter and number series, vocabulary, abstract reasoning, situational judgement, and three-dimensional rotation.

1.4 Assessment criteria
The assessment criteria will be posted in the assignment folder of Cloud Deakin. The criteria are generic lab report criteria, designed to ensure that the guidance you get in all units is the same. Broadly, your lab report will be evaluated according to:
1.How well your abstract provides a concise but meaningful description of the study.
2.How well you build a string rationale for your study, and how it addresses a problem or gap in the literature.
3.How well your method section describes what was done to answer the research question.
4.How well your results section describes how the data were prepared and
analysed, as well as what was found.
5.How well you interpret and synthesise the results in your discussion, factoring in the aims, hypotheses, and broader literature.
6.Your overall writing style (i.e., scientific writing).

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

1.5 Word count :
HPS307 and HPS791
Your Lab Report should be approximately 2,000 words. You can be over or under by 10%, but do try to stick to 2,000 as much as possible. Your marker will not read beyond 2,200 words, so there is no value in going over. The title page, abstract, tables and reference list are not included in your word count, but in-text citations are counted. Your abstract should be no longer than 200 words.

HPS791 additional challenge
HPS791 students have the same word limit as HPS307, but you must incorporate additional hypotheses. Hence, your writing will need to be concise and to-the-point to cover all the necessary aspects of the task.

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

Both HPS307 and HPS791
At the third-year level, you will need to increase the number of resources you access from previous years. Keep in mind, that if you go on to fourth year and beyond, the number of resources you need to integrate into your writing jumps pretty significantly,so this is a good chance to refine your research and writing skills. There is no minimum number of articles to incorporate, but in order to write a reasonable lab report, you will need to read more widely than the articles provided. Remember, we are not so much looking at how many papers you use, but how you use the papers you choose.

Limit your search of the literature to the past 5-10 years so that you are not
overwhelmed with papers to review. You may use papers that are more than 10 years old where relevant, but it is usually better to make use of the most recent research. Many of the papers you find in your search might not be relevant once you read them, so make sure you choose carefully.

Given the word limit, you will not be able to critique each of these fully. However, there will be a few papers that are highly relevant that you should focus on more fully than some of the others. You could consider the similarities between the papers so that you might group them together in some way to discuss them.

Your review should provide a critique of what has been found in the literature to date and the gap or gaps in that literature that your study aims to address.

1.6 Re submission of Discussion section
This is an optional step : When your lab report is returned to you, your marker will have left lots of actionable feedback. In order to help you develop your research and writing skills, you may choose up to five (5) separate items of feedback to action for an additional point per item (i.e. an additional 5/100)*. If your marker has not been able to identify five items to improve on in your discussion, your work is already at a very high standard. You can still address the points they have raised, however, your marks are capped at the number of points raised.

Very important: In order for your marker to see the changes you have made, you must use the ‘track changes’ tool on your resubmitted document (instructions for using track changes in the Re submission Resources folder, under AT1). Resubmitted assignments that do not show the changes that have been made will not be marked (markers are not allocated time to compare documents looking for what has been updated, you must make it very clear for your marker).

For students who received less than 45/100 for their lab report, re submission can be undertaken in order to achieve a maximum score of 50/100 for the task. The re submission must demonstrate substantial improvements by addressing most, if not all of the marker’s major comments in all sections of the report. If this applies to you, please note this in your re submission as a comment to your marker.

In order to achieve further marks, you must demonstrate that you have thought about, and actioned, meaningful aspects of your marker’s feedback. Minor formatting and editing issues that are pointed out should be obvious to you, so the following list of minor writing issues can (and should) be corrected, but do not attract points in the re submission process.
1.Punctuation errors.
2.Spelling errors.
3.Deletion of text without replacement.
4.An error that occurs multiple times. If your marker indicates that you have a mistake (e.g. APA formatting error) that occurs throughout your report, you must correct all instances of the error to be awarded the point.
5.Replacing an older reference with a newer one without changing the text in the associated paragraph.
6.Anything that your marker has denoted with an asterisk (*).

HPS307/791 Personality Assignment Lab Report – Deakin University Australia.

The main thing we hope that you will do is take note of any conceptual feedback that your marker gives you. This is an excellent opportunity to check that your report is on track.

Your final score cannot exceed the maximum points available. For example, if your over all score is 96/100 after first marking, you can only be awarded a maximum of four more marks in the re submission process.