TASK 3 - PERSONALITY INVENTORIES Flashcards
personality trait
= (1) differences among individuals (2) in a typical tendency to behave, think, or feel (3) in some conceptually related ways, (4) across a variety of relevant situations and (5) across some fairly long period of time
Differences among individuals (1)
= personality trait relative to degree of other people
In a typical tendency to behave, think or feel (2)
= likelihood of showing behaviours, thought or feelings
- strong/weak inclination to exhibit behaviours –> external (actions, words) + internal (ideas, emotions)
In some conceptually related ways (3)
= trait is expressed by various behaviours, thoughts, feelings that have some common psychological element
Across a variety of relevant situations (4)
= shown across variety of settings –> not simply habit to specific situation
Over some fairly long period of time (5)
= stable tendency to show relevant pattern of behaviours
- tendency can change across entire life span (long-lasting approximately over a few years)
structured vs. unstructured personality inventories
structured = predetermined set of options, each related to specific ‘trait’
- reverse-coded items
√ good reliability: average response, good indicator of element that is common to items
√ good content validity: items describe wide array of interests, all of which are related to element being measured
unstructured = use of unstructured responses, leaves room for interpretation
x interpretation of practitioner
projective hypothesis
= respondents project aspects of their personality onto unstructured test stimuli
- projection = defence mechanism is described by individuals attributing own (unwanted) personality traits to others (Freud)
projective techniques
= present respondents with an ambiguous stimulus, ask them to disambiguate/decipher/interpret the stimulus
rorschach inkblot test
= series of inkblot patterns; for each inkblot individual asked to interpret what is seeing in pattern
- inkblots: designed to look like one thing in one part and something contradictory in another part; some suggestive shapes that many people can see, personal perception puts ‘critical bits’ together
x many psychologically normal people appear to be pathological –> inaccuracy with norms
- impracticability of administering and scoring test
thematic appreciation test (TAT)
= picture of some people interacting/paragraph that describes beginning of a story; individual is asked to tell a story about the picture/complete story
- pictures: show person’s view of others, attitudes towards self, expectations about relationships; less abstract stimuli than Rorschach
x difficult to know extent adds predictive validity
x time and labour-intensive, no large samples possible
strategies for structured inventories
- empirical strategy
- factor-analytical strategy
- rational strategy
- -> most in rational strategy, often combination
empirical strategy
- writing large number of items that describe very wide variety of actions, thoughts, feelings
- true/false, yes/no, multipoint scale (agreement/disagreement) - self-reports (or observer) on large pool of items from large sample
- extra information for deciding which items should be kept for assessing traits of interest –> items’ relations with outside variable (indicator of given trait)
- empirical selection: on basis of observed evidence of relations of those items with some other information that is believed to give accurate indication of level of given trait (GPA for achievement orientation)
advantages/disadvantages empirical strategy
√ no concern about content of item –> solely based on observed empirical links between items and variable
√ difficult to adjust responses in desired way, to fake responses
x variety of item sets possible due to different samples, chosen indicator variable
- select items based on empirical relations observed within several different samples + different variables
factor-analytic strategy
- large and diverse pool of items + large sample
- find group of related items; each group measures different trait
- sorting correlated from uncorrelated items:
- correlated items: measure same broad personality trait (= same factor)
- uncorrelated items = different factors
- each factor regards one broad trait