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Personalized Affect Assessment

Woods, William (2024) Personalized Affect Assessment. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Interest in personalized assessment techniques has grown in recent years in response to the recognition that diagnostic categories fail to capture clinically meaningful heterogeneity. Personalized assessment approaches involve gathering data about psychopathological processes in participants’ everyday lives via digital surveys. Because of their intrusive nature, personalized assessments involve a tradeoff between comprehensiveness—fully capturing relevant psychopathological processes—and brevity—respecting participants’ time. One approach to finding this balance is to develop person-specific assessment instruments that are tailored to be concise and precise. The current study was designed to test the psychometric performance of personalized and non-personalized, ultra-brief assessments of negative affect (NA). P-technique factor analyses were used to create personalized, 3-item sets from the original 15 NA items. Two 3-item strategies, one rationally chosen and the other randomly generated, were used as non-personalized comparisons. A secondary analysis was performed on data from a sub-sample of the Pittsburgh Girls Study (N = 123), in which participants were selected for recent aggressive behaviors. Participants completed 3-week ambulatory assessment protocol after completing clinical interview and baseline assessment. Results demonstrated that all of the ultra-brief NA assessments, both personalized and non-personalized strategies, were relatively successful in replicating the psychometric performance of the full 15 NA item set. There was no clear advantage to using a personalized approach over the non-personalized approaches. These findings suggest that complex, idiosyncratic affective experiences can be assessed idiographically whilst retaining nomothetic value. They further suggest that a standardized, ultra-brief scale will likely be sufficient for capturing NA in research and clinical settings.

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Details

Item Type: University of Pittsburgh ETD
Status: Unpublished
Creators/Authors:
CreatorsEmailPitt UsernameORCID
Woods, Williamwoodsw@pitt.eduwcw80000-0002-8385-9106
ETD Committee:
TitleMemberEmail AddressPitt UsernameORCID
Committee ChairWright, Aidanaidan@pitt.edu
Committee MemberFraundorf, Scottsfraundo@pitt.edu
Committee MemberGoldstein, Tinagoldsteintr@upmc.edu
Committee MemberPogue-Geile, Michaelmfpg@pitt.edu
Committee MemberRodebaugh, Thomasrodebaugh@wustl.edu
Committee MemberScott, Lori
Date: 27 August 2024
Date Type: Publication
Defense Date: 26 April 2023
Approval Date: 27 August 2024
Submission Date: 3 July 2024
Access Restriction: 1 year -- Restrict access to University of Pittsburgh for a period of 1 year.
Number of Pages: 102
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Schools and Programs: Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology
Degree: PhD - Doctor of Philosophy
Thesis Type: Doctoral Dissertation
Refereed: Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords: Personalized Assessment; Affect; Momentary Assessment
Date Deposited: 27 Aug 2024 13:38
Last Modified: 27 Aug 2024 13:38
URI: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46652

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