Personality Assessment-TEST 2

Question 1

What is the purpose of personality assessment?

Answer 1

Helps the professional counselor and client understand the clients various:
-attitudes
-characteristics
-interpersonal needs
-intrinsic motivations
To gain insight into current events, activities and conflicts and to generalize/understand new situations.

Question 2

Personality Assessment includes:

Answer 2

• screening
• diagnosis
• treatment planning
• outcomes evaluation

Question 3

Counselors can use trait approaches in 6 primary ways:

Answer 3

1) understanding the client
2) making differential diagnoses
3) establishing empathy and rapport
4) giving feedback/insight
5) anticipating the course of therapy
6) matching treatments to clients

Question 4

Strengths of Trait Approaches (4)

Answer 4

• Typically are shorter
• Robust predictive validity
• Most trait inventories are norm referenced, allowing comparisons.
• They focus on normal, healthy personality functioning, allowing us to understand strengths and protective factors in addition to weaknesses.

Question 5

Weaknesses of Trait Approaches

Answer 5

• little explanation as to why traits exist or why they develop or if they are a result of nature/nurture.
• trait approaches are sometimes criticized for being redundant in nature.
• different models predict different numbers of primary traits.

Question 6

Projective assessments:

Answer 6

• present clients with unstructured, ambiguous stimuli and allow a virtually unlimited range of potential responses, based on the assumption that essential information about a client’s personality characteristics, needs, conflicts, and motivations will be transferred onto ambiguous stimuli.
• Freud (psychoanalytic notion of unconsciousness)
• better used as clinical tools (not as a test)

Question 7

5 Types of Projective Techniques

Answer 7

1) Association technique (Rorschach Inkblot)
2) Picture-story construction (TAT-Thematic Apperception test)
3) Verbal completion technique
4) Choice arrangement techniques (ie. play therapy-choice of toy)
5) Production expression technique (House-tree-person)
- see how a child draws things/their perception/thoughts on family and the world etc.

Question 8

Strengths of Projective Techniques (5)

Answer 8

1) Icebreakers/rapport builders as they are perceived as non-threatening
2) unstructured so clients have free reign of speech (not limited in the number/type of response)
3) Responses are more difficult to fake in comparison to structured tests
4) May have cross-cultural applications
5) complex/multidimensional themes may emerge and provide insight into the client’s personality.

Question 9

Weaknesses of Projective Techniques (6)

Answer 9

1) expensive to administer, score and interpret
2) Hard to replicate as they are based on subjective scoring/interpretation
3) Scorer reliability, test-retest, and internal consistency coefficients tend to be unacceptably low, as is projective score validity.
4) Most projective tests have either absent/inadequate norms
5) Projective techniques are susceptible to outside influences, such as examiner characteristics, examiner bias, and variations in administration directions.
6) It is impossible to study psychoanalytic theory, given its emphasis on unconscious psychological processes.