Module 8: Personality Assessment Fundamentals

Question 1

Personality:

Answer 1

refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: one is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole.

Question 2

Personality assessment:

Answer 2

the measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, states, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humour, cognitive and behavioural styles, and/or related individual characteristics.

Question 3

Personality Type:

Answer 3

constellation of traits that is similar in pattern to one identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities.

Question 4

Personality trait

Answer 4

any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another.

Question 5

Personality state:

Answer 5

unlike traits are relatively enduring, states are more transitory, and will depend upon a person’s situation and/motives at a particular time.

Question 6

Personality types: Holland

Answer 6

•	Holland codes categorize people as one of six personality types:
o	Artistic, 
o	Enterprising, 
o	Investigative, 
o	Social,
o	Realistic, 
o	Conventional. 
•	Developed the self-directed search test: a self-administered and self-scored aid to offer vocational assistance.

Question 7

Personality Types:

Answer 7

Type A personality:
• A personality type characterized by competitiveness, haste, restlessness, impatience, feelings of being time-pressures, and strong needs for achievement and dominance.
Type B Personality:
• A personality type that is completely opposite of a type A personality, characterized as being mellow or laid-back.
Type C Personality:
• Passive, calm unable to help self and focusses on others. Difficulty experiencing emotion.
Type D Personality:
• Negative affectivity (e.g., worry, irritability) and social inhibition.

Question 8

Myers Briggs type Indicator:

Answer 8

•	Broadly based on Jung’s Theory: 
•	16 Types based on combinations of scales:
o	Introversion – Extraversion. 
o	Sensing – intuition.
o	Thinking – Feeling. 
o	Judging – Perceiving.

Question 9

Personality profile

Answer 9

a narrative description of the extent to which a person has demonstrated certain personality traits, states or types.

Question 10

Why assess personality:

Answer 10

• Aspects of personality could be explored in:
o Identifying determinants of knowledge about health.
o Categorizing different types of commitment in intimate relationships,
o Determining peer response to a team’s weakest link.
o The service of national defines to identify those prone to terrorism.
o Tracking trait development over time,
o Studying some uniquely human characteristic such as moral judgment.

Question 11

Where we are personality assessment conducted?

Answer 11

• Traditional sites include schools, clinics, hospitals, academic research laboratories, employment counselling, vocational selection centres, and the offices of psychologists and counsellors.
• Personality assessors can also be found observing behaviour and making assessments in natural settings.

Question 12

Why is being assessed and who is assessing?

Answer 12

• Some methods of personality assessment rely on the assesses own self-report.
• Assesses may response to interview questions, answer questionnaires in writing or on a computer.
• Some forms of personality assessment rely on informants such as parents, teachers or peers.

Question 13

Self-Report vs Informant

Answer 13

• Who is being assessed and who is assessing?
o Self-report methods are vey common when exploring an assesses self-concept.
o Self-concept: one’s attitude, beliefs, opinion, and related thoughts about oneself. Some self-concept measures are based on the notion that states and traits related to self-concept are to a large degree context dependent.
o Self-concept differentiation: the degree to which a person has different self-concepts in different roles.

Question 14

What is assessed when a personality assessment is conducted?

Answer 14

• Response style: a tendency to respond to a test item or interview question in some characteristic manner regardless of the content of the item or question. (Mostly yes, or mostly no)
• Impression management: the attempt to manipulate others’ impressions through the selective exposure of some information…coupled with suppression or other information. (faking good, endorsing things to make them seem excessively honest)
• Response styles can affect the validity of the outcome and can be countered through the use of a validity scale.
• Validity scale: a subscale of a test designed to assist in judgements regarding how honesty the test taker responds and whether responses were products of response style, carelessness, deception, or misunderstanding.

Question 15

Approaches to personality testing: How personality assessments structured and conducted?

Answer 15

Personality measures differ with respect to the way conclusions are drawn from the data they provide.
• Nomothetic approach: characterised by efforts to learn how a limited number of personality traits can be applied to all people. E.g., extraversion.
• Normative Approach: A test taker’s responses and the presumed strengths of a measured trait are interpreted relative to the strength of that trait in a sample of larger population.
• Idiographic Approach: characterized by efforts to learn about each individual’s unique constellation of personality traits. E.g., Q-sort.
• Ipsative approach: a test taker’s responses and the presumed strength of measured traits are interpreted relative to the strength of measured traits for that same individual. E.g., Myers-Briggs.

Question 16

Issues in personality test development and use

Answer 16

• Personality assessment that relies exclusively on self-report is vulnerable to false outcomes because there is no way of knowing with certainty the extend of the truth of the assessee’s answers.
• Building validity scales into self-report tests provides some protection against false results.
• Assessors can also affirm the accuracy of self-reported information by consulting external sources such as peer raters.

Question 17

Data reduction methods:

Answer 17

• A well-known use of such methods was employed by Cattell in the 1940’s, in which he reduced a list of more than 18,000 personality trait names (produce by Allport and Odbert in 1936) to only 16 ‘primary’ factors of personality.
• Whether the 16 PF measures 16 distinct factors is still debated, with some arguing that are more than 16 factors while others claim there are fewer.
• The Big Five Inventory (NEO-PI-R) is a measure of five major dimensions of personality and 30 facets that define each dimension (extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness)

Question 18

Cultural Considerations In personality testing:

Answer 18

• Before any tool of personality assessment can be employed, and before data is imbued with meaning, the assessor must consider important issues with regard to individual characteristics (such as cultural background) of the assessee.
• Acculturation: an ongoing process by which an individual’s thoughts, behaviour, values, worldview, and identify develop in relation to the thinking, behaviour, customs, and values of a particular cultural group.
o Acculturation beings at birth and proceeds throughout development.

Question 19

Important to a discussion of acculturation is an understanding of values:

Answer 19

• Instrumental values: guiding principles to help one attain some objective (e.g., honest and ambition).
• Terminal values: guiding principles and a mode of behaviour that is an endpoint objective (e.g., a comfortable life and a sense of accomplishment.)
• Kluckhohn (1954, 1960): conceived of values as answers to key questions with which civilization must grapple.
o For example: in one culture, collectivism is the ideal, in another, individualism and personal striving is emphasised.
• Also, important to a discussion of acculturation is the concept of personal identity, or one’s sense of self.
• Levine and Padilla (1980) defined identification as a process by which an individual assumes a pattern of behaviour characteristic of other people.
• An assessee’s worldview must be considered when examining personality, their unique way of interpreting their perceptions as a result of their experiences, cultural background, and related variables.

Question 20

Objective Methods:

Answer 20

• Objective methods of personality assessment: typically administered by paper-and-pencil or computer and contain short-answer items for which the assessee’s task is to select one response from those provided. (e.g., ‘yes’, ‘no’; ‘true’, ‘false’; very true, sometimes true; never true; can’t say)
• The term objective in relation to personality measures must be considered cautiously.
o Personality tests rarely contain one correct answer.
o Consider as well on its reliance on self-report measures.

Question 21

Projective Measures:

Answer 21

the idea that an individual supplies structure to unstructured stimuli in a manner consistent with the individual’s own unique pattern of conscious and unconscious needs, fears, impulses, conflicts and ways of perceiving and responding.

Question 22

Behavioural assessment methods:

Answer 22

• Focus on what the person does in situations.
• May be in naturalistic settings.
• Target behaviour:
o Frequency: how often do they perform a certain behaviour.
o Precipitation: What happens prior to the aggressive behaviour?
o Reinforcing factors: What seems to be occurring to make the behaviour happen again?

Question 23

Methods of behavioural assessment

Answer 23

• Rating scales
• Self-monitoring
• Analogue studies: what happens at the same time.
• Situational performance measures
• Role play
• Psychophysiological methods
• Unobtrusive measures: watching someone when they are unaware.