Measurement of personality as expressed in everyday life

To examine the expression of personality in its natural habitat, the authors tracked 96 participants over 2 days using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), which samples snippets of ambient sounds in participants’ immediate environments. Participants’ Big Five scores were correlated with EAR-derived information on their daily social interactions, locations, activities, moods, and language use; these quotidian manifestations were generally consistent with the trait definitions and (except for Openness) often gender specific. To identify implicit folk theories about daily manifestations of personality, the authors correlated the EAR-derived information with impressions of participants based on their EAR sounds; judges’ implicit folk theories were generally accurate (especially for Extraversion) and also partially gender specific. The findings point to the importance of naturalistic observation studies on how
personality is expressed and perceived in the natural stream of everyday behavior.

Personality in Its Natural Habitat

This is an interesting study but huge resources would be needed to code the daily interactions manually. Voice activated, rather than periodic recordings, coupled with software which could identify different voices could produce a simple measure of daily interaction frequency, duration, interaction partners. Accompanied with measures of voice loundnesss and perhaps tone, this may be a more feasible alternative for incorporating verbal behaviour into large scale studies.