Methods of Personality Assessment
1. Self-Report Inventories
● A personality assessment technique in which subjects answer questions about their behaviors and feelings.
● Test-takers indicate how closely each statement describes themselves, or how much they agree with each item.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) – translated into more than 140 languages; world’s most widely used psychological test
● Latest: MMPI-2-RF (Restructured Form) (2008)
- a true-false test that consists of 567 statements around physical and psychological health
- clinical scales measure such personality characteristics as gender role, defensiveness, depression, hysteria, paranoia,
hypochondriasis, and schizophrenia
- used with adults in research on personality as a diagnostic tool for assessing personality problems, for employee selection, and
for vocational and personal counseling
● MMPI–A – developed for use with adolescents (478 items)
● Validity scales:
- Cannot say scale (?) – detect non-responsiveness
- L scale – detects social desirability bias
- F scale – detects deviant and atypical response patterns
- K scale – detects “faking good” or “faking bad”
- Fb and Fp scale – new F scales in MMPI-2-RF
- VRIN scale – detects inconsistent random responses
- TRIN scale – detects true response bias
● Downsides:
- Too long
- Some items are highly personal
● Upsides:
- Discriminates between neurotics and psychotics
- Discriminates between the emotionally healthy and the emotionally disturbed
● Critiques:
- Issues on varying IQ levels of test-takers
- Social desirability bias
- Most objective tool to personality assessment
2. Online Test Administration
● No significant differences in responses to most self-report inventories have been found between paper-and-pencil tests and the same tests
administered online
● A prescreening method
● Upsides to taking tests online
- Less time-consuming for both the applicant and the organization
- Less expensive
- Scoring is more objective
- Method is readily accepted by younger members of the workforce
- Prevents test-takers from looking ahead at questions and changing answers already given
- Greater source of anonymity and privacy
3. Projective Techniques
● A personality assessment device in which subjects are presumed to project personal needs, fears, and values onto their interpretation or
description of an ambiguous stimulus.
● Not high in reliability (esp. inter-scorer) and validity
● Widely used for assessment and diagnostic purposes
Rorschach Inkblot Test
● Developed by Hermann Rorschach (1921)
● Responses can be interpreted in several ways, depending on whether the patient reports seeing movement, human or animal figures,
animate or inanimate objects, and partial or whole figures
● Comprehensive system (an attempt to standardize the procedure)
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
● Developed by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan (1935)
● 19 ambiguous pictures and 1 blank card-respondent is made
● Interpretations revolve around personal relationships, motivations of the characters, and the degree of contact with reality shown by the
characters
● No objective scoring systems
● Reliability and validity are low when used for diagnostic purposes
Other Projective Techniques
a. Word association
b. Sentence completion tests
4. Clinical Interviews
● Usually administered to complement objective psychological assessments
● A wide range of behaviors, feelings, and thoughts can be investigated in the interview, including general appearance, demeanor, and
attitude; facial expressions, posture, and gestures; preoccupations; degree of self-insight, and level of contact with reality.
5. Behavioral Assessment
● An observer evaluates a person’s behavior in a given situation
● The better the observers know the people being assessed and the more frequently they interact with them, the more accurate their
evaluations are likely to be
● Arnold Buss and Robert Plomin (developed a questionnaire to assess the degree of various temperaments present in twins of the same
sex)
6. Thought and Experience Assessment
● Thought-sampling approach – a person’s thoughts are recorded systematically to provide a sample over a period of time
● Experience-sampling approach
- much like thought sampling, but the participants are asked also to describe the social and environmental context in which the experience
being sampled occur
- determine how one’s thoughts or moods may be influenced by the context in which they occur
