What Do the Items and Their Associations Refer to in a Network Approach to Personality?

Abstract

It is hard to judge the potential usefulness of a network approach to personality research because Cramer et al. (2012) mix up applications to one individual, inter–individual differences and intra–individual processes. From each perspective, the network units, their associations and causal interpretations of such associations have a completely different meaning, and it depends on the particular perspective, the level of aggregation and whether one wants to model measurement error whether latent variables have a place in network models in personality research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.