Miss Gonzalez's [attempts at doing a] doctorate 1
March 2015
“Scotland is
home to the friendliest, most emotionally stable Brits. Welsh tend to be open
but are the shiest and least emotionally stable. People in East of England
conscientious, agreeable but are less open. Londoners are the most open, but the
least welcoming and not very conscientious. This is according to a survey of
almost 400,000 British residents.”
A recent study which appeared on the BBC identifies where in
Britain one would be happy based on personality traits. The online survey
linked to the news was a shortened version of a study which measured
personality differences by region; these results were clustered to evaluate
whether certain traits were more common in one area or another, and identified
trends such as greater character openness in metropolitan areas. During the
study, a measurement of life satisfaction was also used, and researchers noted
that those who lived with people with similar personality traits were happier.
I have taken the test twice and its results have given
different locations as my best and worst places to live (I am still not too
sure where in Britain those locations were, by the way), and different
happiness ratios in relation to my current home town. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the test proposed that the nearest place where I would be happier was Richmond,
which I agree with, if I could afford it, if there were less noisy planes
overhead and if I wasn’t actually very happy in the place where I live now –
which I cannot afford either, but that’s the wonder of renting.
Whilst the test provided a bit of fun, it also highlighted
some more serious questions about research methodology and the validity of
research which resonated only because I am also in the process of trying to
complete my own research project on attitudinal traits with an element of
quantitative methodology.
The most obvious problem is; how can we really indicate
where one would be happier when happiness is such a difficult construct to
tackle? Again, whilst Richmond is lovely, for me, happiness is where my loved
ones are, my family, my partner. For some, it may be the other way round, and
happiness may be found as far as possible from their family. Geographical
location and the average personality and mores of those surrounding you does
have a bearing on happiness, but it seems to be such a personal thing, a
combination of personality, education and moment in time, that trying to
measure it and then elicit an a location based on average personality traits,
is a fun but futile exercise.
Let’s step back a little. I did query how can one identify
what happiness is to then relate it to where one would be happier by matching
them to the indigenous average personality. But I should have also queried why
should we bother measuring personality through a range of traits, when these
are quite limiting and self-assessed, to produce an average.
Researchers used survey results from a rather big sample of
around 400,000 people of whom two thirds were female. Had I been one of those
400,000 these would have been my results:
Figure 1.
High levels of neuroticism are the trait of a high percentage of language
coordinators in my department
These results are, first, self-assessed. This means that
each respondent evaluates themselves as they see fit and, as in every survey,
may be influenced by socially acceptable results. Thus, they may display an over-critical
view of themselves or include ratings which reflect the way they may want to be
seen socially. Thus the statement “I am an incredibly open person but not very
conscientious” could be translated into “my mum told me to be humble and not
show off about how well I do my work, but I can show off about how much I like
to party”. The first statement reflects results from a quantitative study while
the second could reflect those from a qualitative study. And, please notice, I
say “could”, because the risk of socially acceptable answers is always present,
and I do wonder whether, unless one is a very experienced researcher with a
knack for eliciting the truth, we can never be sure when conducting research
about human perceptions and feelings.
Furthermore, results from the same subject may vary
depending on when the research is taking place. I seem to recall that I rated
myself as more conscientious and agreeable the first time I took the test, and
levels of neuroticism may be related to specific times of the month – which
makes you wonder about the wisdom of using a sample with two-thirds of females,
which actually may just be an indication of the distribution of the population
in general, and makes you wonder whether this would have been better off as a longitudinal
study where subjects would complete the same survey throughout a period of time
(note to self, check this before you question someone else’s research).
Now, rather than questioning the study, I am questioning
myself, trying to answer doubts about methodology that I am currently going
through and to which I found, alas, no answer, or where the answer presented
itself after many hours of fruitless work which led only to one conclusion: if
I cannot know anything for sure, then, what can I know about this anyway? And
why would I want to research something which I think I already know?
Knowing ourselves is hard, but knowing others, once you get
down to it, in research terms, feels like an impossible task. Impossible if we
expect to fully know or understand behaviour, to predict it, measure it and set
it in stone, to generate rules and undeniable facts, or if we expect to be able
to account for every single variable affecting it. With that in mind we hope
that we can somehow know something, as long as we are aware of the limitations
of that knowledge. Thus, with a quantitative approach to understanding
personality, happiness, feelings, we may not really know about people but only about trends, about life presented as a
pointillist painting which you can only understand from far away – remembering
that by looking at the scene, we are missing the points, and that any result is
thus an explanation of a trend, from the studied population, from far away, squinting
a bit, at a specific moment in time.
Figure 2.
This is what quantitative research looks like to me
Figure 3.
It looks better from far away, I can certainly see that people at Richmond are
having a whale of a time
Figure 4.
This is what qualitative research looks like: detailed but distorted by the observer's perception
