Methods and measures in social and personality psychology: a comparison of JPSP publications in 1982 and 2016

ABSTRACT

Reviews of articles from social and personality psychology journals have been largely limited to subsets of publications from particular years and to a focus on descriptive qualities of articles. This paper compares the methods and measures employed in all empirical articles published in 1982 to those that appeared in 2016 from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. There has been an increase in self-report data, a decline in behavioral observations, and an increase in detailed reports of procedures and analyses. A heavy reliance on laboratory experimentation involving college students has been supplanted by online participant pools and data collection procedures. Compared to 1982, articles in 2016 were fewer in number but longer in length, included more studies per article, and had a greater number and diversity of authors. Explanations are offered for these findings along with implications for social and personality psychology.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• personality
• methods
• measures
• publication trends

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Wendiann Sethi for assistance with data analysis and for feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2135088.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/47yrm/.

Notes

1. Studies were excluded if they involved existing data sets. This could include a reanalysis of data or an initial analysis of existing data. The latter could have involved data held by a government or a research institute. In these instances, there was a dearth of information on the methods by which data were gathered.

2. Coding of gender for each author was based on recognizable name, looking up the individual (including asking a colleague), or knowledge of the author by one of the two authors of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Andrew F. Simon

Andrew F. Simon, PhD, PsyD, is a social-organizational psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at Seton Hall University.

David Wilder

David Wilder, PhD, is a social psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.