The Comprehensive Approach to Analyzing Multivariate Constructs

Many psychological constructs of interest to personality psychologists, such as personality, behavior, and emotions, are made up of many variables. Moreover, similarity metrics, such as self-other agreement, profile similarity, or behavioral consistency, result from calculations conducted across many variables. When analyzed using a comprehensive approach, such multivariate constructs present unique analytic challenges. Such challenges are not well addressed in standard graduate statistics textbooks or presently available in standard commercial software. This article introduces the ‘multicon’ package, freely available in the R statistical package, designed to aid researchers interested in taking a comprehensive approach to analyzing multivariate constructs. Realistic examples from personality psychology are provided to demonstrate the utility of this package.