An Interview with 2019 Emerging Scholar Award Winner Ted Schwaba
1. What got you into personality psychology in the first place?
I bet most personality psychologists would endorse an item that goes something like "For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in what makes people act the way they do." But if I had to pick a single defining experience, it would be during my undergraduate years as a research assistant. I was working in a communication studies lab that designed technology for older adults with functional difficulties. But, in weekly lab meetings, I kept asking "personality psychology questions" along the lines of "well, how come this person with arthritis and vision impairment still uses her computer, but this other person just doesn't care to learn?" Turns out I was in the wrong field — now I'm in the right one.
2. What are you most interested in these days?
Facets! A little while ago, I worked on my first project that had usable facet-level data, and I was surprised at the level of unique information that facets contributed — in this study, they developed mostly independently of one another, and they were differentially related to our outcome variables. So I wound up taking a deep dive into the world of facet measurement, and I've emerged a bit less sure of the world than when I started, but even more interested in how to best subdivide (or not) the space below the Big Five.
3. Which topics do you want to tackle in the future?
In the area of personality development, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a minor reproducibility issue regarding the impact of life events on personality change. It doesn't seem to be a file-drawer problem, or a p-hacking problem, but rather the published results in the literature just don't seem to agree with one another. In one study, agreeableness will increase before and after the event, in another, agreeableness will decrease before and after the event, and in a third, we'll find no effect after applying some causal inference technique like propensity score matching. So, in the future, I think we'll need to work together in some capacity to understand, in a more comprehensive and robust way, how life events affect our personality.