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Considerations in Personality Measurement

Replicability, Transparency, and Predictive Validity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Matthew E. K. Hall ,
Gary E. Hollibaugh Jr. ,
Jonathan D. Klingler  and
Adam J. Ramey
Adam J. Ramey
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, USA
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Abstract

In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implementing their preferred approach runs afoul of many contemporary social scientific norms, our use of concurrences to estimate personality traits is far more justifiable than they suggest (especially in contrast to their use of lower court opinions), and their substantive critiques reflect a potential misunderstanding of the nature of conscientiousness. Nonetheless, we also acknowledge their broader point regarding the state-of-the-art textual analysis methodology vis-à-vis the estimation of personality traits, and we provide some constructive suggestions for the path forward.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 397 - 405
Copyright
© 2021 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

This article was reviewed by the editor, Tom S. Clark. Contact the corresponding author, Matthew E. K. Hall, at [email protected].

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