The Separation And Evaluation Of Personal And Environmental Contributions To Behavior By The Person-Centered Model (PCER).

Abstract

The person-centered environmental representation (PCER) model aims to bring extra-personality determiners of behavior measures (stimulus, response form, situation, observer) as known values into the behavioral equations. Illustration begins with the simplest 3-dimensional data box case -- person, test, situation -- in which the response score is a product of the characteristic trait score of the individual and the characteristic interaction of that trait with that kind of performance. In extending this to a particular kind of situation it is recognized that a test-situation interaction term must, realistically, be added. The problem in experiment is to infer the magnitude of the contributors from the 3-sums in the cells of the empirically given data box frame. Three ways of attempting this are described and the third, judged most practical, is illustrated in a plasmode of data typical of experiment. It is shown that the discovery from the frame data of the factor structure, originally put into the contributory test and situation matrices is reasonably good, and it is pointed out that since this can be achieved with only 10 situations, 12 tests and 14 people, the smoothing effect of more typical large samples makes the method practicable. If further research with real data confirms the speculation that the personality factors determining situation reaction are the same as those determining test reaction, a split loading model could be used permitting, as a by-product, assessment of relative variance contributions of differences among persons, stimuli, response forms, and observers.