Assessing Personality

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Assessing Personality

• Personality Testing

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Psychological Testing

• Psychological tests assess a persons abilities,
  aptitudes, interests or personality based on a
  systematically obtained sample of behavior.
• 2 Basic Goals
• Accurately consistently reflect a persons
  characteristics on some dimension.
• Predicts a persons future psychological
  functioning or behavior.

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Personality Assessment

• Projective Techniques
• Interpretation of an ambiguous to trigger
  projection of ones inner thoughts and feelings
• Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts,
  and psychological defenses traits

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Rorschach Inkblot Test

• Presentation and interpretation of a series of
  black and white and colored inkblots
• Developed in 1921.
• Personality test that seeks to identify peoples
  inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations
  of 10 inkblots
• Numerous scoring systems exist

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Thematic Apperception Test

• Series of pictures depicting ambiguous scenes
• Subject is asked to create a story about the
  scene
• Answers are scored based on themes, motives, and
  anxieties of main character

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Drawbacks to Projective Tests

• Examiner or test situation may influence
  individuals response
• Scoring is highly subjective
• Tests fail to produce consistent results
  (reliability problem)
• Tests are poor predictors of future behavior
  (validity problem)

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Testing for TraitsSelf-Report Inventories
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Personality Inventories

• Questionnaires on which people respond to items
  designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and
  behaviors
• Used to assess selected personality traits
• Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of
  questions
• Persons responses to standardized questions are
  compared to established norms.

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Validity

• The extent to which a test measures or predicts
  what it is suppose to test
• Personality inventories offer greater validity
  than do projective tests (e.g. Rorschach used by
  proponents of the humanistic perspective).

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Reliability

• The extent to which a test yields consistent
  results, regardless of who gives the test or when
  or where it is given
• Personality inventories are more reliable than
  projective tests.

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MMPI

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
  (MMPI)
• Most clinically-used personality test
• 500 total questions
• Originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

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MMPI Scoring Profile
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MMPI-2

• Revised and updated version of the MMPI
• Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales and 15
  content scales
• Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was
  intended.

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Other Self-Report Inventories

• California Personality Inventory (CPI) assesses
  personality characteristics in normal
  populations.
• Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF)
  Cattells test that creates a personality
  profile on 16 trait dimensions.

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Testing for Careers

• Play Personality Testing for Career Choice
  (359) Segment 28 from Psychology The Human
  Experience.

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Strengths of Self-Reports

• Standardizedeach person receives same
  instructions and responds to the same questions
• Use of established norms results are compared to
  previously established norms and are not
  subjectively evaluated
• Greater reliability and validity than projective
  tests.

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Weaknesses of Self-Reports

• Evidence that people can fake responses to look
  better (or worse)
• Some people are prone to responding in a set way,
  whether the item accurately reflects them or not.
• Tests contain hundreds of items and become
  tedious
• People may not be good judges of their own
  behavior