Personality Assessment

• Personality scales and self ratings

• Interview data

• Reports/ratings by other people

• Behavioural assessment

• Physiological measures

• Responses on Projective tests

Reliability and Validity

• Reliability: the consistency of a measure

  • You should score similarly on a personality test every time you take it

  • Test-retest reliability - tests are consistent over, scores are stable

    • if tests are consistent, that is high test retest reliability

  • Interjudge reliability - level of agreement among observers

• Validity: the accuracy of a measure, as assessed by the degree to which you are actually measuring what you think you are measuring

Personality Assessment

• Interviews

  • A structured set of standardized questions

  • Note other behaviours - appearance, speech patterns, etc

  • Drawbacks:

    • Characteristic of interviewer can affect answers

    • Depend on co-operation and honesty of interviewee

• Behavioural Assessment

  • Need explicit coding system

  • aim is not to solely describe behaviour

  • specific behaviour, frequency, specific situations, under what conditons

• Remote Behaviour Sampling

  • Sample behaviour at random times over a period of days, weeks, etc.

  • Allows for data collection of behaviour that may otherwise not be revealed

• Personality Scales

  • Objective measures

  • use standard questions and agreed upon scoring key

  • Advantage

    • collect tons of data

  • Disadvantages

    • Validity of answers - are the answers true

    • Used to detect a ‘pattern’ in responses

    • Have to have analysis of validity of your own questions

• Projective Tests

  • Presented with ambiguous stimuli, and ask people to interpret that stimuli

  • Interpretation = ‘projection’ of inner needs, feelings, ways of viewing the world

  • Two main tests

    • Rorshach Inkblots

    • Thematic Apperception Tests

Developing Personality Scales

• Rational Approch: Based on idea of what the trait is

  • ask questions that are relevant to that trait

  • eg, NEOPI (Costa and McCrae)

• Empirical Approach: Base our grouping on responses to differentquestions, and having patterns in those responses

  • MMPI -2

Theory and Assessment

• Who uses what tools?

  • Psychodynamic = projective techniques

  • Humanistic = self report measures

  • Social cognitive = behavioural assessments

  • Biological = physiological measurement

  • Trait theorists = inventories (MMPI, NEO-PI)