Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals

Duckworth (2007) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · Read the paper

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). 'Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087. The founding paper. The abstract's own headline figure, grit 'accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes', and the claim this article tests: 'Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness.' Study 1 built the two-factor structure on 27 candidate items, retained twelve, and recorded the objection that later became the live question: 'We considered the possibility that these two factors were an artifact of positively and negatively scored items but were convinced that the factor structure reflected two conceptually distinct dimensions.' The sentence that justified a single total score, contradicted by the 2017 meta-analysis: 'In subsequent analyses, neither factor was consistently more predictive of outcomes than the other.' Study 4, West Point Class of 2008, 1,218 cadets, 94.2 per cent completing; the Whole Candidate Score did not predict retention but predicted academic grade point average

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). 'Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087. The founding paper. The abstract's own headline figure, grit 'accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes', and the claim this article tests: 'Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness.' Study 1 built the two-factor structure on 27 candidate items, retained twelve, and recorded the objection that later became the live question: 'We considered the possibility that these two factors were an artifact of positively and negatively scored items but were convinced that the factor structure reflected two conceptually distinct dimensions.' The sentence that justified a single total score, contradicted by the 2017 meta-analysis: 'In subsequent analyses, neither factor was consistently more predictive of outcomes than the other.' Study 4, West Point Class of 2008, 1,218 cadets, 94.2 per cent completing; the Whole Candidate Score did not predict retention but predicted academic grade point average

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Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101.