Personality Assessment: An Overview

Personality and Personality Assessment

• Personality: an individual’s unique constellation of psychological traits that is relatively stable over time

• Personality Assessment: the measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, states, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, sense of humor, cognitive and behavioral styles, and/or related individual characteristics

• Personality Trait: “any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another”

• Personality Type: a constellation of traits that is similar in pattern to 1 identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities

  • John Holland argued that most people can be categorized as 1 of the 6 personality types

  • Conventional: data driven, analytical, detail-oriented

    • biostatistician, data administrator

  • Realistic: practical, scientific, methodological

    • public health veterinarian or dentists

  • Investigative: observe, analyze, evaluate

    • epidemiologist, environmental health specialist, health services researcher

  • Enterprising: influence, persuade, perform

    • public health policymaker and planner

  • Social: enlighten, inform, train

    • health educator, health promotion specialist

  • Artistic: innovative, intuitive, creative

    • public health communications specialist

  • Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Roseman developed a 2 category personality typology

  • Type A Personality: a personality type characterized by competitiveness, haste, restlessness, impatience, feelings of being time-pressured, and strong needs for achievement and dominance

  • Type B Personality: a personality type that is completely opposite of type A personality, characterizes as being mellow or laid-back

• Personality Profile: a narrative description of the extent to which a person has demonstrated certain personality traits, states, or types

  • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): frequently discussed in terms of the patterns of scores that emerge, referred to as a profile

  • MMPI and MMPI-2

  • introduced several innovations in the construction of structured personality traits

  • true-false self-report questionnaire; Statements are typically of the self-reference type such as “I like good food” and “I never have trouble falling sleep.” The heart of the test consists of its validity, clinical, and content scales.

  • Validity Scale: provide information about the person’s approach to testing, such as whether an attempt was made either to “fake bad” by endorsing more items of pathological content than any person’s actual problems could justify or to “fake good” by avoiding pathological items

  • Clinical Scale: designed to identify psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia

  • Content Scale: consist of groups of items that are empirically related to a specific content area

    • the anger scale contains references to irritability, hotheadedness, and other symptoms of anger or control problems

  • Purpose: to assist in distinguishing normal from abnormal groups

  • designed to aid in the diagnosis or assessment of the major psychiatric or psychological disorders

  • Masculinity-Femininity (MF) Scale: contained items differentially endorsed by men and women

  • Social-Introversion (Si) Scale: measures introversion and extraversion

  • Validity Scales: measure test-taking attitudes and to assess whether the subject took a normal, honest approach to the test

• Validity Scales

  • L Scale (Lie Scale): designed to detect individuals who attempted to present themselves in an overly favorable way

  • K Scale: attempts to locate those items that distinguished normal from abnormal groups when both groups produced a normal test pattern

  • F Scale (Infrequency Scale): designed to detect individuals who attempt to fake bad, consists of those items endorsed by less than 10% of the control group

• Restandardization: MMPI-2

  Additional Validity Scales

  • Variable Response Inconsistency Scale (VRIN): attempts to evaluate random responding

  • True Response Inconsistency Scale (TRIN): attempts to measure acquiescence -- the tendency to agree or mark “true” regardless of content

  • 15 Content Scales: HEA (health concerns), TP (hard-driving, irritable, impatient Type A Personality), FAM (family problems), WRK (work interference)

Personality Assessment: Some Basic Questions

• Aspects of personality could be explored in

  • identifying determinants of knowledge about health

  • categorizing different types of commitment in intimate relationships

  • the service of national defense to identify those prone to terrorism

  • tracking trait development over time

• Who is being assessed and who is assessing?

  • some methods of personality assessment rely on the assessee’s own self-report

  • assessees may respond to interview questions, answer questionnaires in writing or on a computer

  • some forms of personality assessment rely on informants such as parents, teachers, or peers

  • self-report methods are very common when exploring an assessee’s self-concept

  • Self-Concept: one’s attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and related thoughts about oneself

  • in some situations, the best available method for assessment of personality and/or behavior involves a third party

  • it is necessary to proceed with caution when using a third-party referent for personality assessment

  • knowledge of the context of the evaluation and the dynamic of the relationship between the rater and the assessee is important

• What is assessed when a personality assessment is conducted?

  • some tests are designed to measured particular traits or states

  • other tests focus on descriptions of behavior, usually in particular contexts

• Where are personality assessments conducted?

  • traditional sites include schools, clinics, hospitals, academic research labs, employment counseling, vocational selection centers, and the offices of psychologists and counselors

  • personality assessors can also be found observing behavior and making assessments in natural settings

• How are personality assessments structed and conducted?

  • the scope of an evaluation may be very wide, seeking to take a general inventory of an individual’s personality

  • some instruments purport to measure a much narrower escape

  • personality may be assessed by many different methods, such as face-to-face interviews, computer-administered tests, behavioral observation, paper-and-pencil tests, evaluation of case history data, evaluation of portfolio data

  • measures of personality very in terms of their structure, with some measures being very structured and others being relatively unstructured

  • personality measures differ with respect to the way conclusions are drawn from the data they provide

  • Nomothetic Approach: characterized by efforts to learn how a limited number of personality traits can be applied to all people

  • Idiographic Approach: characterized by efforts to learn about each individual’s unique constellation of personality traits

Developing Instruments to Assess Personality

• logic and reason may dictate what content is covered by the items on a personality test

  • the use of logic and reason in the development of test items is sometimes referred to as the content or content-oriented approach to test development

  • a review of the literature on the aspect of personality that test items are designed to tap will frequently be very helpful to test developers

• personality measures differ in the extent to which they rely on a particular theory of personality in their development and interpretation

• data reduction methods are another class of widely used tool on contemporary test development

  • such methods are used to aid in the identification of the minimum number of variables or factors that account for the intercorrelations in observed phenomena

• Data Reduction Methods

  • a well-known use of such method was employed by Cattell in the 1940s, in which he reduced a list of more than 18,000 personality trait names (produced by Allport and Odbert in 1936) to only 16 “primary” factors of personality

  • whether the 16PF measures 16 distinct factors is still debated, with some arguing that there are more than 16 factors while others claim there are fewer

  • The Big Five Inventory (NEO-PI-R) is a measure of 5 major dimensions of personality and 30 facets that define each dimension (extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness)

• Criterion Groups

  • Criterion: a standard which a judgment or decision can be made

  • Criterion Group: a reference group of test takers who share specific characteristics and whose responses to test items serve as a standard according to which items will be included or discarded from the final version of a scale

  • Empirical Criterion Keying: the process of using criterion groups to develop test items

Personality Assessment and Culture

• before any tool of personality assessment can be employed and before data is imbued with meaning, the assessor must consider important issues with regard to individual characteristics (such as cultural background) of the assessee

• Acculturation

  • an ongoing process by which an individual’s thoughts, behaviors, values, worldview, and identity develop in relation to the thinking, behavior, customs, and value of a particular group

  • begins at birth and proceeds throughout development

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