Person/Situation (Environment) Assessment

Introduction

This entry gives an overview of the importance of person/situation interaction for the psychological assessment of either persons or situations, and provides guidelines for the assessment of person/situation interaction.

Any individual's specific behaviour such as a stress reaction varies across situations and can be graphically represented as an intraindividual situation profile of that behaviour. A behaviour shows a person/situation interaction if different individuals vary differently across situations in that behaviour (graphically: their situation profiles are not parallel). In such a case, the interindividual differences within situations are not consistent across situations; hence the behaviour correlates lower than 1 between the situations.

Figure 1 illustrates three typical cases: (a) no person/situation interaction between situations 1, 2 (note that the curves of the two individuals differ, however, in the ...