La Mort du Chercheur: How well do students' subjective understandings of affective representations used in self-report align with one another's, and researchers'?

We address empirical methods to assess the reliability and design of affective self-reports. Previous research has shown that students may have subjectively different understandings of the affective state they are reporting [18], particularly among younger students[10]. For example, what one student describes as "extremely frustrating" another might see as only "mildly frustrating." Further, what students describe as "frustration" may differ between individuals in terms of valence, and activation. In an effort to address these issues, we use an established visual representation of educationally relevant emotional differences [3, 8, 25]. Students were asked to rate various affective terms and facial expressions on a coordinate axis in terms of valence and activation. In so doing, we hope to begin to measure the variability of affective representations as a measurement tool. Quantifying the extent to which representations of affect may vary provides a measure of measurement error to improve reliability.