Dynamics In Personality and Social Relationships: Short- and Medium-Term Processes in Daily Life (DIPS 2) - Follow-Up Proposal

• Applicants: Dr. Theresa Margareta Entringer, since 10/2022; Professorin Dr. Cornelia Wrzus
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409793692

Social interactions are an integral part of life: They emerge from the fundamental human need for social contact and social relationships. Yet the strength of this need and how it is satisfied differ between people and over time. Previous studies on the topic focused primarily on static differences between people in their social interactions and social relationships (e.g., frequency of contact with friends, marital quality, social network size) and on specific personality domains (e.g., Big Five traits or attachment styles) without fully accounting for the larger social context (e.g., social network composition, population density). The proposed project aims at filling these gaps and achieving two main goals: (1) to study the temporal dynamics of social relationships such as short-term changes in contact and relationship quality with almost continuous observation of people’s behavior in daily life using mobile sensing and experience sampling methods, and (2) to examine how social relationship dynamics vary with personality characteristics such as extraversion, agreeableness, and affiliative motives, as well as with the larger social context (e.g., social network size and composition, population density).To achieve these goals, we planned two studies. In Study 1, social interactions are assessed continuously over 48 hours using mobile sensing (MS), experience sampling methods (ESM), and day reconstruction methods (DRM), in combination with data on personality and social networks characteristics. This study offers unique information on the comprehensiveness of MS, ESM, and DRM for daily social interactions in relationships and allows to compute algorithms for measuring the quantity and for the first time quality of social interactions based on mobile phone data. Furthermore, the data allow first analyses of personality effects on social dynamics, which are extended in Study 2. Study 2 assesses social interactions with mobile sensing for two weeks among the participants of the SOEP-IS. The SOEP-IS is a yearly panel study on sociological, economic and psychological topics with over 7,000 participants aged 17-96 years from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The results will help to understand how personality and social context predict dynamic changes in social interactions within and between relationship partners over periods of hours, days, and weeks. Furthermore, the project offers unique findings because it employs a very comprehensive approach by taking multiple relationships, diverse personality characteristics, and distal social resources (e.g., working and living conditions) as well as their interdependencies into account in representative samples of people and of social interactions. The application for a 12-month follow-up funding seeks to complete the studies that were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred during the first two-year funding period and severely affected social dynamics in daily life.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. David Richter, until 9/2022