Self-Reports, Peer Ratings and Construct Validity

Self-reports of behaviour have been criticized as fraught with problems that seriously undermine the construct validity of conventional personality measures The problems are related to a putative absence of or distortion of a person's knowledge about himself or herself A proposed solution is to use peer reports of personality instead, because such observer ratings are presumably more impartial and free of the distorting influences affecting self-reports. We review some past research On moderators of the agreement between self reports and peer ratings of personality, arguing that those findings support the validity of self-ratings We conclude that peer ratings, although highly useful as adjuncts to other methods of assessment, are no substitute for self-reports as a source of personality information Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd