Measuring personality

Objective assessment

 not dependent on judgement or interpretation by the assessor

Subjective assessment

 relies on judgment or interpretation by the assessor

Reliability

 give an index of the consistency in test score

Validity

does the item measure what it claims to measure

Social desirability bias

some answers are more socially desirable than others

Faking bad/good bias

 answering the test score to seem more bad or good than you are

Acquiescence response bias

tendency to answer yes, no matter the content of the item

Self report

 a method where the individual itself reports their feelings, thought, behavior, etc

• Advantage - easy to administer and usually reliable 

• Weakness - risk of self report bias, falsification bias, etc

Rating and judgement by others

rating or judgment made by other people that has insight into the general functions of the individual, teachers, partner, parents, etc 

• Advantage - can be good complement to self reports 

• Weakness - biases or lack of knowledge in the observer

Projective test

interpretation of response to relatively unstructured or ambiguous task or situation  

• Advantage - the way the person responds/perceives the task/stimuli/situation captures the person’s primal and unconscious reactions, motives, motives, etc that aren’t able to be measured in self reports 

• Weakness - lack of validity and reliability

Interviews

can be structured, unstructured or semi structured 

• Advantages - flexible way to assess personality 

• Weakness - might be biased by the expectation or behavior of the interviewer, can be time consuming

Expressive behavior

observe behavior in an individual  

• Advantage - can capture how people do things instead of what 

• Weakness - can be difficult to capture, code and interpret

Content

 measure all aspects, e.g. all symptoms of a diagnosis

Criteria related

how well the test result matches relevant criteria

Concurrent

 how well a new test matches an existing test

Predictive

 how well a test predicts future behavior/outcome

Convergent

 the instrument correlates with other instruments that measure related concepts

Discriminant

 the instrument does not correlate with instruments that measure unrelated concepts

Q-data

what I say about me, direct access to your inner life, bias lie.

T-data

what I do under a test, more objective, lab situation

L-data

what happens in my life, real life situation/objective, many causes/hard to get

Q-sort

sort statement about me, nuanced/good comparing, fixed item pool/time consuming