For today's assignment, I would like for you to download the following data set: click here to download personality trait data. The information regarding the variable names is provided on the following web page: variable names. This data set contains the data you provided a few weeks ago on personality, health, and life satisfaction. You should have some experience analyzing these data already in your "life satisfaction" assignment from last week. The composite variable for life satisfaction is appended to the end of this data set.

Once you've downloaded the data set and opened it in SPSS, I would like for you to answer the following questions. Please jot your answers down on a spare sheet of paper and turn it in to your TA at the end of the session.

1. The first research question I would like for you to address concerns the relationship between personality and birth rank. Some personality psychologists (e.g., Frank Sulloway) have argued that first-born children should to be less open to new experiences relative to later borns (i.e., people who have older siblings). To examine this hypothesis in your our data set, you should correlate a measure of birth rank with a measure of openness to experience.

a. To obtain a measure of birth order, you'll need to create a new variable that takes into account the information contained in the variable called "sibsize" and the information contained in the variable called "birthorder". "Sibsize" contains answers to the question "How many children were in your family of origin (including yourself)?" "birthorder" contains information in response to the question "What is your birth order? If you were the first born among several siblings (or an only child), choose '1'. If you were the third born among 3 or more siblings, choose '3'." You should create a new variable called "birthrank" (or any other name you choose) that represents a person's relative position in the family--his or her "birthorder" divided by "sibsize." A score of 1 on this variable means that the person is the last born. The lower the score on this variable, the more this person's birthrank resembles that of the oldest child. (Please note that this measure is imperfect. I encourage you to consider better ways to quantify birthrank.)

b. You will also need to obtain a measure of openness to new experiences. There are several questionnaire items in the survey that were designed to do so. You should create a new composite variable, called "open," that is the average of the following variables:

vbfi10, vbfi12*, vbfi15, vbfi22, vbfi23, vbfi25, vbfi32, vbfi35, vbfi44

Please note that one of these variables, bfi12, will need to be reverse keyed. Each item was rated on a 1 to 5 scale.

c. Create a scatter plot between your new variables, birthrank and open. Does the relationship appear to be positive or negative.

d. Compute the correlation between these two variables. What is the correlation? What does it mean? What might you conclude about the relationship between birthrank and openness to new experiences? Is this correlation consistent with Frank Sulloway's predictions?

2. In creating the composite variable "open," we assumed that the various items were all measures of the same latent construct--openness to experience. If this is a valid assumption, then the items should all be positively correlated with one another. Check to see if this is the case. What is the smallest correlation? What is the largest?

3. Does birthrank correlate with life satisfaction?

4. Are highly open people more satisfied with life?