Talk:Personality and life outcomes

Untitled

Paul, love your course description! Linp11 (talk) 03:30, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! (literally just figured out how to respond, huzzah!) Moonpe11 (talk) 15:49, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Suggestions

This needs a copy-edit. In the intro, it reads "been shown to be just as power in predicting occupational success"...it should say powerful. Also, the piece about "Big Five personality traits have also been linked to academic success of Israeli high-school students." does not belong in the intro...(this will bring needless drama). The "Predictive Power" section is somewhat misleading as it neglects to mention the effects of social context. In your Power of personality source, on p338, it reads: "Finally, certain social contexts may wash out the effect of individual difference factors, and, in turn, people possessing certain personality characteristics may be resilient to seemingly toxic environmental influences. A systematic understanding of the relations between personality traits and social environmental factors associated with important life outcomes would be very helpful." You can cite individual pages in the references. See User:Smallman12q/Reference example for an example.Smallman12q (talk) 01:06, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Smallman! These seem like manageable edits. Moonpe11 (talk) 21:10, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Orphan status

I took off the orphan banner, I linked it to our class wiki page and added the WFU banner. Moonpe11 (talk) 23:14, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Merge

This should be merged (and substantially shortened) to Big Five personality traits. This is clearly just a part of that topic; the whole thing could be summarized as one paragraph mentioning several examples of this line of research that these personality measures are correlated with various life outcomes. rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:14, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

That's a legitimate suggestion, I can see what you mean about it being a subsection of the Big Five personality traits. I realize this is going to be a poor response, but this article is for a class assignment which has a word limit. Our grades should be finalized within a few weeks however, and if it's okay with you (and whoever else believes this shouldn't be it's own page) I was hoping it could stay as is, length wise, until then. After that I will merge it myself. But if you feel it's completely unnecessary that it remain it's own page I understand, and I'll go ahead a merge it. Moonpe11 (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. It's not really fair for your professor to assign grades based on his/her own word count criteria, given that Wikipedia has its own editorial criteria and editors like me are not going to ignore Wikipedia's standards just so a professor can do a class project. It puts you into the awkward situation of having to write content that is not necessarily improving the project (the way things are now, many of these articles are clutter--it's not your fault, but these would just be better as part of the same article organized around one topic, rather than scattered on separate pages just because different students got assigned to work on them) but being penalized with a bad grade if you don't do it.

So I'm not sure what the best course of action is. For the reasons I outlined above, I really do think this would be better as just a small paragraph (or even just one or two sentences) in the main article; not because you've done a bad job, but just because it is inherently a limited topic that doesn't deserve a Wikipedia article of its own. (In an academic journal, of course, it would be perfectly fine to write a whole article focusing in on this topic; Wikipedia, however, is just meant to be an encyclopedic overview of bigger topics.) Maybe the best thing to do would be to let your professor know about this issue and direct him/her to this discussion. Best, rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:25, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

That absolutely makes sense, the topic is quite limited and I'm at fault for choosing one that can't really stand on its own as an article. We're all very new to this, including my professor (first year we've done this at Wake), and the word limit is just a way to be sure we're all putting in similar amounts of time and effort into the project (it's not the end all say all of our grade, however it is a substantial portion) and not simply throwing up a paragraph or two and calling it a semester. Is there a way you can see this being a stand alone article via reduction of certain sections (ie: the Presidents or relational outcomes) or addition to others? Or possibly broadening the entire page altogether somehow, possibly to include more of the social context which also play a role in life outcomes? If not, I'll move it to my sandbox until the grading process is over, reevaluate what I've got, reduce it to the main points and move it to a sub section of the Big Five personality traits page over the summer. I appreciate your feedback! Moonpe11 (talk) 02:37, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond.

I'm not very knowledgeable about this particular topic so I'd better not speculate about how it may or may not be possible to expand the article. But based on what's written here now I don't think it can be a stand-alone article; as it's written, it's more about the Big Five than anything else. If "personality and life outcomes" is, however, a broader topic, which can have something written about it beyond just how it relates to the Big Five traits, then maybe it could do better as a stand-alone article. rʨanaɢ (talk) 23:35, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Review

Hi Moonpe11, I think your article is doing great in keeping an encyclopedic tone with a NPOV, so I just have organizational suggestions:

• Using bullets may help to simplify the organization a little bit (e.g. the three types of outcomes)
• On that note, you could also further organize the health/academic/relationship/etc. outcomes by including them as sub-headers of each of the three outcomes
• Replacing "as stated above" (actually, I need to go delete "aforementioned" in my article) because not everyone reads Wiki articles from top to bottom, so it may throw off readers
• Do you think there'd be a way to organize the outcomes by personality traits? Like if someone just wanted to read all about the outcomes of Extraversion? Not sure how, just wondering...

Good job! :) Linp11 (talk) 22:29, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey Linp11! Sweet, thanks for the feedback, I'll get on those edits. That's a valid point about organizing the article by traits, and one I seriously considered. I kind of like it divided up by the outcomes though as that's the main point of the article. Thanks again! Moonpe11 (talk) 00:14, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Moonpe11, Great work!! I agree with feedback from Linp11: your tone, coverage, and neutral POV are admirable! Here are some relevant copy-edits to consider:

• Can you cite bullet points 1 and 2 under health outcomes? (These are really interesting findings!)
• Can you internally link to trait activation theory? (It may help clarify this theory for those without a psychology background.)
• Under Predictive Power, can you add what context/ samples these findings are limited to?
• Under Academic Outcomes, can you define synthesis-analysis and elaborative-processing learning styles (or link within Wiki)? Again, these styles may be less familiar to those without education or psychology training, but help underscore the importance of this finding.
• Under Romantic Relationships, is it possible to cite the first two sentences? There are lots of findings here which readers may want to follow up on!

Plroseman (talk) 04:48, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Sourcing problems

As but one example with sourcing issues, the lead of this article asserts as fact:

Romantic relationship satisfaction, in dating, engaged, and married couples, is also predicted by Big Five personality traits. [4]

which is sourced to a primary study, that is a self-report questionnaire to boot. Seriously. Please see Wikipedia:RS#Primary.2C secondary.2C and tertiary sources; :Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources." and "Material based purely on primary sources should be avoided." Please review throughout for WP:OR, and correctly source assertions of fact to secondary sources. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that reports largely on secondary sources, not a publisher of original research based on unreviewed primary studies. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:28, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

That's a legitimate concern, and I see your point. The only problem is in psychology almost everything is from a primary source. If you check out the Big Five personality traits page you'll notice the vast majority of the citations are primary sources, journal articles, so it's sort of the nature of the beast when adding psychology relevant content. With regards to the self-reports, that's quite common in personality psychology. But in that study they also used observers ratings of the relationship quality as well as the partner's ratings, so it wasn't from solely self-reports. Moonpe11 (talk) 14:33, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I presume you mean that in Wikipedia articles in the pysch realm, "almost everything is from a primary source", which doesn't make it right (just means our psych articles are a mess and on one has yet fixed them, and these articles add to that mess). See WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Big Five personality traits has the same problem. It's not the "nature of the beast", it's just bad editing that hasn't yet been corrected. I've linked to our policy pages which describe the use of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources; this article is incorrectly sourced. and what relevant text can be cited to secondary sources should be merged to broader articles. We don't create original research on Wikipedia from primary sources-- that is the work of professionals. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:55, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Wake Forest University supported by WikiProject Psychology and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2012 Q1 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:50, 2 January 2023 (UTC)