A large-scale analysis of test-retest reliabilities of self-regulation measures

The ability to regulate behavior in service of long-term goals is a widely studied psychological construct known as self-regulation. This wide interest is in part due to the putative relations between self-regulation and a range of real-world behaviors. Self-regulation is generally viewed as a trait, and individual differences are quantified using a diverse set of measures including self-report surveys and behavioral tasks. Accurate characterization of individual differences requires measurement reliability, a property frequently characterized in self-report surveys, but rarely assessed in behavioral tasks. We remedy this gap by (1) providing a comprehensive literature review on an extensive set of self-regulation measures, and (2) empirically evaluating retest reliability in this battery of measures in a new sample. We find that self-report survey measures of self-regulation have high test-retest reliability while measures derived from behavioral tasks do not. This holds both in the literature and in our sample. We confirm that this is due to differences in between-subjects variability. We also compare different types of task measures (e.g., model parameters vs. raw response times) in their suitability as individual difference measures, finding that certain model parameters are as stable as raw measures. Our results provide greater psychometric footing for the study of self-regulation and provide guidance for future studies of individual differences in this domain.

自我调节能力，作为一种旨在服务于长期目标的广泛研究心理结构，被誉为自我控制。这一领域的广泛兴趣部分源于自我调节与多种现实行为之间的假设性关联。自我调节通常被视为一种特质，个体差异通过包括自我报告调查和行为任务在内的一系列多样化措施进行量化。准确描述个体差异需要测量可靠性，这一特性在自我报告调查中常被描述，但在行为任务中却很少被评估。我们通过以下两个方面弥补这一差距：（1）提供关于广泛自我调节措施的全面文献综述；（2）在一个新的样本中，对这一系列措施的重测可靠性进行实证评估。我们发现，自我调节的自我报告调查措施具有高重测可靠性，而源自行为任务的措施则不具有。这一发现既适用于文献，也适用于我们的样本。我们证实，这归因于个体间变异性的差异。我们还比较了不同类型的任务措施（例如，模型参数与原始响应时间）作为个体差异措施的适用性，发现某些模型参数与原始措施一样稳定。我们的结果为自我调节的研究提供了更强的心理测量基础，并为该领域个体差异的未来研究提供了指导。