<p>Once upon a time a couple years B.C. (BC stands for <em>before coronavirus</em>), when I was a student, I asked my advisor about using two questionnaires in my research. One was some emotional intelligence questionnaire and the other one was Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The goal was to check if high self-esteem people have higher emotional intelligence.</p>
<p>She said&quot; Sure, you can, but you need to remember that 'self report measures always correlate with themselves'. She meant that even if you give two really different, conceptually unrelated questionnaires there will always be some correlation - the reason for that wasn't the correlational noise (or crud factor) but the fact, that there was the same people who answer both set of items. Q: Have you ever heard that? Is it a sort of another <em>research legend</em> or maybe it is true? It seems compelling, but I'm a bit sceptical about how it could work.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-08T19:31:19.380Z
Self-report measures can be designed to be orthogonal (not correlate), as may be done for sub-scales for example.  Here are the correlations between the sub-scales of the Big 5 personality inventory: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-among-the-Big-Five-personality-traits_tbl1_284349515 - I don't think this was done purposefully, but you can see that some correlate, and some don't.
Arnon Weinberg
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-10T06:45:11.177Z
This is an interesting question and I will be eager to see what answers come out of it
Chris Rogers
<methodology><statistics>
Self-report measures always correlate? Research legends or the truest truth
Lil'Lobster
# Self-report measures always correlate? Research legends or the truest truth

(Asked by: username_0 on 2022-08-08)

Once upon a time a couple years B.C. (BC stands for *before coronavirus*), when I was a student, I asked my advisor about using two questionnaires in my research. One was some emotional intelligence questionnaire and the other one was Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The goal was to check if high self-esteem people have higher emotional intelligence.

She said" Sure, you can, but you need to remember that 'self report measures always correlate with themselves'. She meant that even if you give two really different, conceptually unrelated questionnaires there will always be some correlation - the reason for that wasn't the correlational noise (or crud factor) but the fact, that there was the same people who answer both set of items. Q: Have you ever heard that? Is it a sort of another *research legend* or maybe it is true? It seems compelling, but I'm a bit sceptical about how it could work.

**Tags:** methodology, statistics

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Self-report measures can be designed to be orthogonal (not correlate), as may be done for sub-scales for example.  Here are the correlations between the sub-scales of the Big 5 personality inventory: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-among-the-Big-Five-personality-traits_tbl1_284349515 - I don't think this was done purposefully, but you can see that some correlate, and some don't.  
> **username_2**: This is an interesting question and I will be eager to see what answers come out of it  

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