Task 3 - Personality Assessment Flashcards
Personality trait
- Differences among individuals
- in a typical tendency to behave, think or feel
- In some conceptually related ways
- across a variety of relevant situations
- Over some fairly long period of time
Can be measured by self- or observer-reports (=structured personality inventories)
Strategies of personality inventory construction
EMPERICAL STRATEGY
writing down large number of items, content not to important. Then choosing items that are most correlated to some outside variable
–>based solely on observed, emprical links betweens items and some variable assumed to be indicator of trait
advantage: individuals cant adjust their responses
Criticism: associations may not be strong among all sample of individuals, sample may not be representative of population, for high validity need very large selection of items
FACTOR ANALYTIC STRATEGY:
begins with large pool of items, then items are grouped for different traits, sorting items together, identity of the traits is revealed by the results of the factor analysis
RATIONAL STRATEGY:
writing down items thought to describe traits, figuring out which items are the “best” ones, choosing items most strongly related to each other
criticism: bad list to begin with, can be obvious to participant what is being measured
COMPARISON OF THE THREE
similar levels of reliability and validity,
difference in usefulness for contructing inventories
Rational approach is generally much simpler and easier to implement than other two, because it doesnt requre existing item pool
Most inventories contructed according to rational strategy, but often in combination with some aspects of the other two strategies
History of personality assesments
Personality assesment era began in late 19th century europe
Early 20th century highlights:
development of projective techniques (rorschach),
several self-report inventories
recent 30 year showed expansions into…
…personal screening
…clincial assesment
…therapeutic assessment
LATTER HALF OF 20th CENTURY
cattel & slice (1957) published 16-PF
MMPI became most widely used adjustment-oriented persoanlity sclae
- ->MMPI-2 published in 18989
- ->MMPI-A in 1992
Millon developed MCMI to asses personal problems among clients in psychotherapy in 1977
morey devloped PAI in 1991
Psychological tests start to become respected and engaging task for clinical practitioners
Rorschach
Inkblot tests asks people to describe what they see in series of 10 inkblots
–>most popular projective method
in 1970s problems were corrected by Exner who intruodcued comprehensive system which established rules for delivering and interpreting roschach test
results are interpreted by psychologist, rating reactions on more than 100 characteristics
PROBLEM:
different evaluators = different ratings
poorly equiped to identify most psychiatric conditions (exception: schizophrenia)
does not consistently detect depression, anxiety or psychopathy
not valid for detecting violence, impulsiveness or criminal behavior
no evidence supports use for detecting sexual abuse in children
TAT
=thematic apperception test
asks respondent to formulate story based on ambiguous scnes in drawing on cards (31 cards available)
PROBLEMS:
“clincians delight and statisticans nightmare”
most clinicans interpret people’s story intuitively
very little psychologists use standardized scoring systems
questionable validity
Global scoring systems
not based on signs
psychologists who apply such methods combine many aspects to come up with general impression of a persons adjustment
may work better than sign approach because the act of aggregating information can cancel out “noise” from variables that provide misleading information
this literature review indicates that roschach, the TAT and human figure drawings are useful only in very limited circumstances. Same is true for many other projective techniques, they tend to lack “incremental validity”, they rarely add much information that can be obtained in other, more practical ways
