Do State and Trait Measures Measure States and Traits? The Case of Community-Dwelling Caregivers of Older Adults

Abstract

Spielberger’s state and trait anxiety and anger scales are widely used and documented, but there is little or no direct evidence that they actually measure their respective state and trait aspects as was intended. We conducted latent state-trait analyses on data collected from 310 community-dwelling caregivers of older adult care recipients and found that (a) both state and trait scales reflected a mixture of state and trait aspects of their latent constructs, (b) state scales reflected more state-like variance than did corresponding trait scales, but (c) both state and trait scales were dominated by stable trait-like variance. Follow-up bivariate latent state-trait analyses indicated that correlations between trait components of anger and anxiety correlated more strongly with trait components of caregiver–care recipient mutually communal behavior and care recipient problem behavior than did state–state component correlations. Implications for the measurement of state and trait components of psychological constructs are discussed.

How state and trait versions of self-esteem and depressive symptoms affect their interplay: A longitudinal experimental investigation.

“…Using self-esteem and depressive symptoms as example constructs to which we applied different time frames, we observed higher stabilities when applying trait measures compared with state measures. These finding are in line with results from previous studies (Lance et al, 2019;Watson et al, 1988) for which more trait variance and higher stabilities were found when using 5 Results based on models without longitudinal constraints on all regression coefficients deviated slightly from those with longitudinal constraints (see Table B9 and Table B10 in online supplemental material B4). In addition, we added the (latent state-trait) cross-lagged results for females only (the constrained and unconstrained CLPM for the exploratory and confirmatory studies and LST-CLPM for the confirmatory study; see online supplemental material B5, Tables B11, B12, and B13).…”

“…In clinical research, however, there are several inventories that include both state and trait options (Spielberger, 1966, 1995). For instance, based on Spielberger’s state-trait anxiety questionnaire, a recent study observed that state anxiety revealed more state residual variance than trait anxiety and vice versa (Lance, Christie, & Williamson, 2019). In addition, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scales include explicit variations along the continuum of state and trait time frames that are directly related to the temporal stabilities and mean levels of the PANAS scales (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).…”

The “situative nature” of competence and value beliefs and the predictive power of autonomy support: A multilevel investigation of repeated observations.

“…Additionally, more systematic research is certainly needed to grasp a better sense of how the framing of the items (i.e., the time frame and the level of specificity) affects the decomposition of variance and, even more importantly, the associations with other variables (see Braun et al, 2021;Lance et al, 2019; see also Goetz et al, 2016;Goetz, Bieg, et al, 2013).…”

“…This contradicts previous findings from Wagner et al (2016), who found that variance in students' shared perceptions of autonomy support was predominantly due to differences between students and between classes and only marginally due to fluctuations within students and within classes over time. However, Wagner et al used trait-like instead of situation-specific measures (which in itself can already be a reason for different proportions of variance; Braun et al, 2021;Lance et al, 2019), and consequently, the differences in the findings are not that surprising after all.…”

The "situative nature" of competence and value beliefs and the predictive power of autonomy support: A multilevel investigation of repeated observations

“…This contradicts previous findings from Wagner et al (2016), who found that variance in students' shared perceptions of autonomy support was predominantly due to differences between students and between classes and only marginally due to differences within students and within classes over time. However, Wagner et al used "trait-like" instead of situation-sensitive measures (which in itself can already be a reason for different proportions of variance; Braun et al, 2020;Lance et al, 2019), and consequently, the differences in the findings are not that surprising after all. Our findings additionally revealed that students' perceptions of the provision of meaningful rationales was more situation-specific than their perceptions of an autonomy-supportive learning climate (created through attention to and consideration of students' feelings and thoughts in the classroom, the provision of meaningful choices, and the nurturing of the inner motivational resources of the students).…”