Chapter 3 Issues in Personality Assessment

Question 1

Assessment

Answer 1

Measuring of Personality

Question 2

Observer Ratings

Answer 2

• Someone other than the person being assessed
• Interviews
• Watching his or her actions
• Observe a person’s belongings

Question 3

Interviews

Answer 3

• Can be especially insightful if person is asked to talk about something other than themselves- boundaries come down
• In the moment observation vs. summative judgments

Question 4

Snoopology

Answer 4

• studied people’s offices, bedrooms, and other personal domains
• People “portray and betray” their personalities by the objects and mementos they surround themselves with. (Gosling, 2008)
• Identity claims: symbolic statements about who we are
• Indicators of how we want to be regarded
• Can be directed to other people who enter our space, or they can be directed to ourselves, reminders to ourselves of who we are
• Feeling regulators: help us manage our emotions
• Behavioral residue: physical traces left in our surrounds by everyday actions
• Tell more the residue, the less organized you probably are.
• Give an indication of what sorts of things take place repeatedly in your life space

Question 5

Self Reports

Answer 5

• People themselves indicate what they think they’re like or how they feel or act.
• Introspection
• Ask people to respond to a specific set of items
• Many formats
• True-false
• Multipoint rating scale
• Some focus on a single quality of personality

Question 6

Inventory

Answer 6

• Measure that assesses several dimensions of personality
• Go through each step of development for each scale of the inventory, rather than just one.
• Multiple scales

Question 7

Implicit Assessments

Answer 7

*Attempt to find out what a person is like from the person (like self-reports) but not by asking him or her directly.
*Discover people’s unconscious attitudes or perceptions- often include parts of their personalities they may be ignorant of or try to hide
-Given a task of some sort that involves making judgments about stimuli.
-The pattern of responses (ex: reaction times) can inform the assessor about what the person is like
*Ex: Implicit Association Test (IAT)
-Semantic properties in memory that are believed to be hard to detect by introspection
-Categorize a long series of stimuli as quickly as you can
Motive approach to personality
*The person being assessed produces a sample of “behavior”
-Action
-Internal behavior-heart rate
-Answering questions

Question 8

Subjective Measures

Answer 8

*Interpretation is part of the measure

Question 9

Objective Measures

Answer 9

*The measure is of a concrete physical reality that requires no interpretation

Question 10

Reliability

Answer 10

• Once you’ve made an observation about someone, how confident can you be that if you looked again a second or third time you’d see about the same thing?
• Consistency/repeatability

Question 11

Error

Answer 11

• randomness
• Can be reduced, but not eliminated
• Repeat the measure- make the observation more than once
• Measuring the same quality from a slightly different angle or using a slightly different “measuring device”

Question 12

Internal Consistency/Internal Reliability

Answer 12

• Each observer or item carries its own error, so to cancel out, we use many different question items. Internal Consistency refers to the extent that they all agree with one another.
• Within a set of observations of a single aspect of personality
• The items are highly reliable means that people’s responses to the items are highly correlated.
• More items in self-reports
• Different telescrope
• Different math problem

Question 13

Split Half Reliability

Answer 13

• Separate the items into two subsets (odd vs. even-numbered items), add up people’s scores for each subset and correlate the two subtotals with each other
• If the two halves of the item set measure the same quality, people who score high on one half should also score high on the other half, and people who score low on one half should also score low on the other half.
• Measure internal consistency

Question 14

Inter-rater Reliability

Answer 14

• both see about the same thing when they look at the same event
• Trained in how to observe what they’re observing
• Agreement among different raters/observers

Question 15

Item response theory (IRT)

Answer 15

• Attempt to increase the efficiency of assessment, while reducing the number of items
• Determining the most useful items, and the most useful response choices, for the concept being measured
• Creation of response curves: show how frequently each response is used, and whether each choice is measuring something different from other choices
• Determines the “difficulty” of an item
• Computerized adaptive testing (CAT)

Question 16

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT)

Answer 16

*Ensures that less difficult items are not given after an item of medium difficulty has been endorsed

Question 17

Stability Across Time

Answer 17

Extent to which measurements are stable over time

*Test Re-Test Reliability

Question 18

Test Re-Test Reliability

Answer 18

*Giving the test to the same people at two different times

Reliability concerns repeatability across time

Question 19

Validity

Answer 19

*Whether what you’re measuring is what you think you’re measuring (or what you’re trying to measure).

Question 20

Construct Validity

Answer 20

• How well deos operational definition (the event) match the conceptual definition (the abstract quality you have in mind to measure)?
• Close, high validity; aren’t close, low validity
• Other subtypes of validity all provide support for construct validity

Question 21

Conceptual and Operational Definition

Answer 21

• Ex: Love
• Conceptual definition: a strong affection for another person
• Operational definition: ask the person you’re assessing to indicate on a rating scale how much she loves someone/measure how willing she is to give up events she enjoys in order to be with him.

Question 22

Criterion Validity (Predictor Validity)

Answer 22

• Other manifestations (behavioral index/external criterion) of the quality it’s supposed to measure
• Does your measurement produce results that are consistent with an external criterion, such as a trained observer?
• Does it accurately predict what it purports to measure?
• Tests how well the measure predicts something else it’s supposed to predict
• Often relevant when developing a new scale- if it’s consistent with other, already established measurements of same construct
• Best way to predict construct validity
• Too often, researchers choose criterion measures that the poor reflections of the construct.

Question 23

Convergent Validity

Answer 23

• Showing that the measure relates to characterisitics that are similar to, but not the same as, what it’s supposed to measure.
• The evidence “converges” on the construct you’re interested in, even though any angle finding by itself won’t clearly reflect the construct.
• Ex: Measure dominance
• Should relate at least a little to measures of qualities such as leadership (positively) or shyness (inversely)

Question 24

Discriminant Validity

Answer 24

• It does not measure qualities it’s not intended to measure- especially qualities that don’t fit your conceptual definition of the construct.
• Defense against the third-variable problem

Question 25

Face Validity

Answer 25

• The assessment device appears, on its “face,” to be measuring the construct it was intended to measure. It looks right.
• Easier to respond to than measures with less face validity
• Distinctions between qualities of personality that differ in subtle ways
• Detriment: threatening or embarrassing to admit-> reduce face validity
• Convenient to have

Question 26

Response Sets

Answer 26

• Psychological orientation, a readiness to answer in a particular way
• Biase in people’s responses in assessment
• Create distortions in what’s assessed

Question 27

Acquiesence

Answer 27

• Emerges most clearly when the assessment device is a self-report instrument that, in one fashion or another, asks the person questions that require a “yes” or “no” response (“agree” and “disagree”)
• Tendency to say “yes”
• Everyone does this but to varying degree
• Can be prevented by having some items that ask reverse
• Write half the items so that “yes” means being at one end of the personality dimension. Write the other half of the items so that “no” means being at that end of the personality dimension. In the process of scoring the test, then, any bias that comes from the simple tendency to say “yes” is canceled out.
• Negatively worded items often are harder to understand or more complicated to answer than positively worded items -> less accurate

Question 28

Social Desirability

Answer 28

• Reflects the fact that people tend to portray themselves in a good light (in socially desirable ways) whenever possible.
• Phrasing undesirable responses in ways that makes them more acceptable
• Let people admit the undesirable quality indirectly
• Include items that assess the person’s degree of concern about social desirability and use this information as a correlation factor in evaluating the person’s responses to other items.

Question 29

Ration/Theoretical approach

Answer 29

• Based on theoretical considerations from the very start
• First develops a theoretical basis for believing that a particular aspect of personality
• Create a test in which this dimension validly and reliably in people’s answers
• Often leads to assessment devices that have a high degree of face validity
• Majority of personality measurement devices that exist today were developed using this path
• What to measure -> How to measure (some of the measures/most in chapters)

Question 30

Empirical/data-based approach

Answer 30

• Relies on data, rather than on theory, to decide what items go into the assessment device
• The person developing the measure uses the data to decide what qualities of personality even exist.
• Important contributor to trait psychology
• Reflects a very pragmatic orientation to the process of assessment
• Guided less by a desire to understand personality than by a practical aim: to sort people into categories

Question 31

Criterion keying

Answer 31

*The criterion is the groups into which people are to be sorted. To develop the test, you start with a huge number of possible items and find out which ones are answered differently by one criterion group than by other people.
*Reflects the fact that the items retained are those that distinguish between the criterion group and other people.
If an item set can be found for each group, then the test (all item sets together) can be used to tell who belongs to which group.
*Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): very long true-false inventory that was developed to assess abnormality
-A large number of self-descriptive statements were given to a group of normal persons and to groups of psychiatric patients
The criterion already existed
*MMPI-2 is increasingly recognized that different diagnostic categories are not as distinct as they were formerly thought to be.
-Recognition of this pattern is a broad (and intense) reconsideration of the nature of psychiatric diagnosis.