The state component in self-reported worldviews and religious beliefs of older adults: the MacArthur Successful Aging Studies.

Meaningful and measurable aspects of short-term intraindividual variability have been established in what are conceptualized to be relatively stable interindividual differences dimensions. Illustrative are anxiety and other temperament traits as well as certain kinds of cognitive abilities. Reclamation of "signal" from the "noise" of intraindividual variability has rested heavily on research designs that involve frequently repeated observations. We extended this line of research to other trait-like domains by examining biweekly self-reports of world views and religious beliefs of a sample of elderly participants. The results indicated that not only is there occasion-to-occasion variability in the self-reports but the structure of these fluctuations is consistent over time and bears considerable resemblance to structures reported from cross-sectional data.