Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment information

Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment (SAPA) is a method used for telemetric assessment of individual differences, primarily in the context of online surveys. The SAPA method uses data collected from the administration of large inventories of personality assessment items to large pools of participants, though it differs from traditional data collection methods in that each participant responds to only a small subset of all available items. In other words, each participant receives a random (or partially random) subset of the items under study. As long as some of the items are overlapping between pairs of participants, the smaller subset is more palatable for individual participants yet can be combined to synthesize large covariance matrices (with considerable data missing at random). In this way, the SAPA methodology is well-suited for assessing personality and individual differences across multiple domains.^[1] It is also a highly efficient means for new item prototyping and scale construction.^[2]