Novice Counselor's blog

There are three approaches to the study of personality: clinical, experimental, and correlational.

Clinical Research is based on case studies. A case study describes in detail the study of an individual, capturing the complexities of the personality of the person. The goal of a case study is to obtain a detailed psychological portrait of the person. One drawback of case studies is that the individual portrait does not allow application of the findings to a broad base of people. A second drawback of a case study is that it does not identify the causes of personality characteristics and how life events influence one another(Pervin, Cervone, & John, 2005).

Correlational research involves personality test and questionaires which chart the differences among people. Correlational research involves gaging to what extent two variables go together. For example, correlational research can tell the researcher whether people who have a high score on one variable, e.g. anxiety, also have a high score on another variable, e.g. longevity. Thus, correlational research may pit one personality variable against another. Correlational research has two limitations; one is that in comparison to case studies, correlational research provides relatively superficial information about individuals; the second limitation is that, like case studies, correlational research provides little information about causality(Pervin, Cervone, & John, 2005).

Experimental research is a strategy in which variables are manipulated though the random assignment of persons to different conditions. If people in one condition respond differently than people in another, then one can conclude that the variable that was manipulated causally influence the response. This determination of causality is an advantage of experimental research over the other two research strategies(Pervin, Cervone, & John, 2005).

An example of clinical research can be found in an article by Porcerelli, J. H., Dauphin, (2007) entitled “Psychoanalysis with Avoidant Personality Disorder: A Systematic Case Study” from Journal of Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, and Training. The article describes a case study of process and outcome based upon data obtained during a 5-year psychoanalysis of an adult male with avoidant personality disorder (AVPD). At the time of the study, according to the authors, no known systematic case studies, effectiveness studies, or randomized control trials existed for psychoanalysis in the treatment of AVPD. In this study, self-reported symptoms and observer-rated personality disorder (PD), global functioning, object relations, and psychological health were gathered at intake, after each year of treatment, and at 1-year follow-up. Results indicated that the patient achieved clinically significant reductions in PD, symptom severity, and relational pathology. Gains were maintained at 1-year follow-up. The treatment adhered to psychodynamic principles throughout, with some use of cognitive– behavioral and interpersonal principles in the third year of treatment. The authors say that these findings warrant further investigation of psychoanalysis for AVPD and demonstrate the usefulness of assessing multiple domains of patient functioning and treatment process.

Pervin, L. A., Cervone, D., & John, O. P. (2005). HS5214: Theories of personality [Custom]. New York: Wiley.

Porcerelli, J. H., Dauphin, B. V., Ablon, J. S., Leitman, S., Bambery, M.,(2007); Psychoanalysis with Avoidant Personality Disorder: A Systematic Case Study; Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training; Vol. 44, No. 1.