Abstract
Personality traits such as grit and self-control are important determinants of success in life outcomes. However, most measures of these traits, which rely on self-reports, might be biased when used for the purpose of evaluating education policies or interventions. Recent research has shown the potential of survey effort-in particular, item non-response and careless answering-as a proxy measure of these traits. The current investigation uses a dataset of high school seniors (N = 513) to investigate survey effort measures in relationship with teacher reports, performance task measures, high school academic outcomes, and college attendance. Our results show promise for use of survey effort as proxy measures of grit and self-control.
Highlights
IntroductionThough the importance of personality traits such as grit (passion and perseverance for longterm goals) and self-control (the ability to regulate attention, emotion, and behavior despite temptations) to life outcomes including education levels, career success, health outcomes, and criminal behavior is well-established [1], [2], [3]), researchers have struggled to find nonbiased measures of these traits to be used for the purpose of evaluation of education policies and interventions [4], Further, many existing datasets lack any measures at all
Though the importance of personality traits such as grit and self-control to life outcomes including education levels, career success, health outcomes, and criminal behavior is well-established [1], [2], [3]), researchers have struggled to find nonbiased measures of these traits to be used for the purpose of evaluation of education policies and interventions [4], Further, many existing datasets lack any measures at all
We study the relationship between survey effort measures and other performance task measures designed to capture related traits like academic diligence, effort put Survey effort measures of grit and self-control forward by students on tedious school related tasks [15], and frustration tolerance, the ability to overcome frustration arising from challenges that block goals [16], Our results suggest that survey effort can be used as proxy measures of grit and self-control
Summary
Though the importance of personality traits such as grit (passion and perseverance for longterm goals) and self-control (the ability to regulate attention, emotion, and behavior despite temptations) to life outcomes including education levels, career success, health outcomes, and criminal behavior is well-established [1], [2], [3]), researchers have struggled to find nonbiased measures of these traits to be used for the purpose of evaluation of education policies and interventions [4], Further, many existing datasets lack any measures at all. Recent literature has proposed the use of survey effort as proxy measures of grit and selfcontrol to either supplement information obtained through self-reports, which might be affected by multiple types of bias (e.g., reference group bias and social desirability bias; see [4]), or to complement datasets that lack measures of these traits [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], Why? By studying how much effort students put into surveys, we can obtain proxy measures of a student’s grit and self-control.
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