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Assessing Personality
Doctors, researchers, and employers use personality assessments for a variety
of reasons:
- Clinical psychologists often use assessments as aids for diagnosing psychological disorders.
- Some mental health providers use tests to decide how best to counsel people about normal problems of daily living.
- Some organizations use assessments to select personnel to hire, although this practice is decreasing in popularity.
- Researchers frequently use tests in the course of studying personality traits.
Three important ways of assessing personality include objective tests,
projective tests, and assessment centers.
Objective
Personality Tests
Objective personality tests are usually self-report
inventories. Self-report inventories are paper-and-pen tests that
require people to answer questions about their typical behavior. Commonly used
objective tests include the MMPI-2, the 16PF, and the NEO Personality Inventory.
The MMPI-2
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) was developed in the 1940s and revised in the 1980s. The
revised version is called the MMPI-2. The MMPI-2 contains a list of 567
questions. People taking the test must answer these questions with
true, false, or cannot
say.
The MMPI was originally developed to help clinical psychologists
diagnose psychological disorders. To interpret the MMPI-2, psychologists
divide the answers to questions into fourteen subscales. Ten of these
subscales are clinical subscales, which give information about different
aspects of the test taker’s personality. The other four subscales are
validity subscales, which indicate whether the test taker was careless or
deceptive when answering questions. A score on any single subscale doesn’t
provide a clear indication of a specific psychological disorder. Rather, the
score profile, or pattern of responses across subscales, indicates specific
psychological disorders.
The 16PF
The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
(16PF) is a test that assesses sixteen basic dimensions of
personality. It consists of a list of 187 questions.
The NEO Personality Inventory
The NEO Personality Inventory measures the Big Five
traits: extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Report Inventories
Self-report inventories are useful because they allow psychologists to
get precise answers to standardized questions. In other words, all subjects
who take a test answer the same questions, and all subjects have to select
answers from the same range of options. Inventories are also objective,
which means that different people scoring the same test would score them in
the same way. However, these scores might be interpreted differently by
different people.
There are several disadvantages to self-report inventories as well:
- Self-report inventories often contain transparent questions, which means subjects can figure out what a psychologist wants to measure. Therefore, subjects can lie intentionally and fake personality traits they don’t really have. Researchers who develop tests address this problem by including lie scales in tests, which provide information about the likelihood that a subject is lying.
- The social desirability bias can affect responses on self-report inventories. In other words, when filling out an inventory, people might state what they wish were true, rather than what is true. Test developers can minimize this bias by dropping questions that are likely to evoke it.
- People sometimes don’t understand the questions on the test. Test developers try to address this issue by wording questions very clearly so that they have only one possible interpretation.
- People sometimes don’t remember aspects of the experience they are asked about.
Projective Personality Tests
Projective personality tests require subjects to respond to
ambiguous stimuli, such as pictures and phrases, that can be interpreted in many
different ways. Projective tests are based on the projective
hypothesis, which is the idea that people interpret ambiguous stimuli in
ways that reveal their concerns, needs, conflicts, desires, and feelings.
Clinical psychologists and researchers often use two projective tests: the
Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
The Rorschach Test
The Rorschach test consists of a series of ten inkblots.
Psychologists ask subjects to look at the inkblots and describe what they
see, and the psychologists then use complex scoring systems to interpret the
subjects’ responses. Scores are based on various characteristics of
responses, such as the originality of the response and the area of the blot
described in the response. The Rorschach gives psychologists information
about the subject’s personality traits and the situational stresses the
subject may be experiencing.
The Thematic Apperception Test
The Thematic Apperception Test
(TAT) consists of a series of pictures containing a variety of
characters and scenes. Psychologists ask subjects to make up stories about
each picture and look for themes that run through the subjects’ responses.
For example, a person with a high need for achievement may consistently come
up with stories that have achievement-related themes.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Projective Tests
Projective tests are useful because they allow psychologists to assess
unconscious aspects of personality. Projective tests are also not
transparent: subjects cannot figure out how their responses will be
interpreted. Therefore, subjects cannot easily fake personality traits on a
projective test.
A serious disadvantage of projective tests is that they have
questionable reliability and validity. Despite this flaw, many researchers
and clinicians find that such tests give them useful information.
Assessment Centers
Assessment centers allow psychologists to assess personality in specific
situations. In assessment centers, subjects are made to face situations in which
they must use particular types of traits and skills, and their performance is
then assessed. Assessment centers work on the well-accepted idea that the best
predictor of future behavior is past behavior in similar situations. For
example, a corporation may select a person for a managerial position by placing
candidates in a simulated managerial situation for half a day and assessing
their performance.
Assessment centers are useful for selecting personnel for positions of
responsibility because they predict how people will act in challenging
situations. However, assessment centers are expensive and time
consuming.
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