PSY2205 Lecture 5: Personality Measurement

Question 1

What is Psychometrics?

Answer 1

Its basically just the theory and methods of psychological measurement.

Question 2

Why are psychometrics important?

Answer 2

Due to the impact of testing on the individual and in wider society, it is important to have high professional standards for the development, administration and interpretation of tests.

Question 3

What is factor analysis in psychometrics?

Answer 3

It is a statistical method that allows a lot of data to be reduced to a few important factors.

Factor analysis is the statistical technique used by Hans Eysenck and Raymond B. Cattell and it eventually resulted in the Big Five

Many of the disagreements between different theorists are the result of differences in their use of factor analysis.

Question 4

What is the process of factor analysis?

Answer 4

1. measure shit ton of people in different ways using different questions.
2. Correlate scores on each measure with scores on every other measure (correlation matrix).
3. Determine how many factors (traits) need to be hypothesised in order to account for the various clusters of inter-correlations. When items show a high correlation with one another they are thought to measure the same ability or characteristic – this is called a factor or a trait.
4. Subjectively decide meaning of each factor and label it. Should reflect the meaning of the items that cluster together to make the factor.
5. Standardise personality measure. Test measure on hundreds of people representative of pop. Analyse responses and develop norm.

Question 5

Give a summary of Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality

Answer 5

3 super-traits (Extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism) . Off of these super traits are narrow/ subordinate traits.

Question 6

What does it mean for psychometrics to be reliable?

Answer 6

Test-retest reliability= stability/ repeatability over 3 months later

Internal consistency= all the items are measuring the same thing. The best index for this is Cronbach’s Alpha.

Question 7

What does it mean for psychometrics to be valid?

Answer 7

Is the assessment definitely measuring what its supposed to be? Because obviously personality is a hypothetical construct, without a physical reality. We cannot directly measure it, we can only measure behaviour that suggests it.

There should also be concurrent validity which is comparing a new test with an existing test (of the same nature) to see if they produce similar results.

Question 8

What are the strengths of psychometrics?

Answer 8

Objective/scientific way of describing people and their behaviour.

Easy and can gather a shit ton of quantitive data for analysis

Question 9

What are the weaknesses of psychometrics?

Answer 9

Its hard to make these tests fully reliable and valid.

Culture bias, especially intelligence testing.