Personality Assessment - An Overview

Chapter 12
Personality Assessment: An
Overview
McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2013 McGraw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved.

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” (Guilford, 1959, pg. 6)
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• Personality type: a constellation of traits that is similar in
pattern to one identified category of personality within a
taxonomy of personalities
John Holland argued that most
people can be categorized as one of
six personality types: Artistic,
Enterprising, Investigative, Social,
Realistic, or Conventional
Developed the Self-Directed Search

test (SDS; Holland et al., 1994), a
self-administered and self-scored
aid to offer vocational assistance.
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• Personality types
– Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman
developed a two-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,
characterized as being mellow or laid-back
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The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) is frequently discussed in terms of the patterns of
scores that emerge, referred to as a profile.
• Personality profile: a narrative description of the
extent to which a person has demonstrated certain
personality traits, states, or types
Personality state: the transitory exhibition of some
personality trait; a relatively temporary predisposition
•Measuring personality states amounts to a search for and an
assessment of the strength of traits that are relatively
transitory or situation-specific.
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Personality Assessment: Some Basic
Questions
• Why assess personality?
– Aspects of personality could be explored in:
• Identifying determinants of knowledge about health
• Categorizing different types of commitment in intimate
relationships
• Determining peer response to a team’s weakest link
• The service of national defense to identify those prone
to terrorism
• Tracking trait development over time
• Studying some uniquely human characteristic such as
moral judgment
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Questions
• 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.
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Questions
– 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
• Some self-concept measures are based on the notion that
states and traits related to self-concept are to a large
degree context-dependent
– Self-concept differentiation: the degree to which a person has
different self-concepts in different roles
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Questions
– In some situations, the best available method for
assessment of personality and/or behavior involves
a third party (e.g., a parent, teacher, or spouse).
– 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.
– Raters may vary in the extent to which they are
neutral.
12-9
Questions
• What is assessed when a personality
assessment is conducted?
– Some tests are designed to measure particular traits
(e.g., introversion) or states (e.g., test anxiety).
– Other tests focus on descriptions of behavior,
usually in particular contexts.
12-10
Questions
• What is assessed when a personality assessment is
conducted?
– Response style: a tendency to respond to a test item or
interview question in some characteristic manner regardless
of the content of the item or question
– Impression management: the attempt to manipulate
others’ impressions through “the selective exposure of
some information…coupled with suppression of [other]
information” (Braginsky et al., 1969, p. 51).
– Response styles can affect the validity of the outcome and
can be countered through the use of a validity scale
• Validity scale: a subscale of a test designed to assist in
judgments regarding how honestly the testtaker
responded and whether responses were products of
response style, carelessness, deception, or
misunderstanding 12-11
Questions
• Where are personality assessments conducted?
– Traditional sites include schools, clinics, hospitals,
academic research laboratories, 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.
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Questions
• How are personality assessments structured
and conducted?
– The scope of an evaluation may be very wide,
seeking to take a general inventory of an
individual’s personality.
• The California Psychological Inventory (CPI 434) is an
example of such an evaluation; it yields information on
many personality-related variables such as
responsibility and dominance.
– Some instruments purport to measure a much
narrower scope.
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Questions
and conducted?
– Instruments used in personality assessment vary in
the extent to which they are based on a theory of
personality.
• An example of a theory-
based instrument is the
Blacky Pictures Test (Blum,
1950).
• Other tests are atheoretical,
such as the MMPI. 12-14
Questions
and conducted?
– 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, and
recording of physiological responses.
– Measures of personality vary in terms of their
structure, with some measures being very
structured and others being relatively unstructured.
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Questions
• How are personality assessments structured and
conducted?
– Frame of reference: aspects of the focus of
exploration such as the time frame (the past, present,
or the future) as well as other contextual issues that
involve people, places, and events
– Q-sort technique: an assessment technique in which
the task is to sort a group of statements, usually in
perceived rank order ranging from most to least
descriptive
• Carl Rogers utilized this technique to identify the
discrepancy between the perceived actual self and the
ideal self
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Questions
How are personality assessments structured and conducted?
– 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
– Normative approach: a testtaker’s responses and the presumed
strength of a measured trait are interpreted relative to the
strength of that trait in a sample of a larger population
– Ipsative approach: a testtaker’s responses and the presumed
strength of measured traits are interpreted relative to the
strength of measured traits for that same individual
12-17
Questions
• Issues in personality test development and use
– Personality assessment that relies exclusively on
self-report is vulnerable to false outcomes because
there is no way of knowing with certainty the
extent of the truth of the assessee’s answers.
– Building validity scales into self-report tests
provides some protection against false results.
– Assessors can also affirm the accuracy of self-
reported information by consulting external
sources such as peer raters.
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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.
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Personality
• 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.
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Personality
• Data reduction methods
– A well-known use of such methods was employed by
Cattell in the 1940’s, 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 16 PF measures 16

distinct factors is still debated, with
some arguing that there are more
than 16 factors while others claim
there are fewer.
12-21
Personality
• Data reduction methods
– The Big Five Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa &
McCrae, 1992) is a measure of five major
dimensions of personality and 30 facets that define
each dimension (extraversion, neuroticism,
openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness).
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Personality
• Criterion groups
– Criterion: a standard on which a judgment or
decision can be made
– Criterion group: a reference group of testtakers
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
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Personality
• Criterion groups
– Development of a test by means of empirical
criterion keying involves the following:
• Creation of a large preliminary pool of test items from
which the final form of the test will be selected.
• Administration of the preliminary pool to at least two
groups of people: (1) a criterion group of people known
to possess the measured trait; and (2) a random sample.
• Conduct an item analysis to select items indicative of
membership in the criterion group.
• Obtain data on test performance from a standardization
sample of testtakers who are representative of the
population from which future testtakers will come.
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The MMPI
12-25
Personality
• The MMPI has three scales built in to the
measurement to combat the problems inherent in
self-report methods: the L scale (the Lie scale),
the F scale (the Frequency scale), and the K
(Correction scale).
– The L scale will call into question the examinee’s
honesty
– The F scale contains items that are infrequently
endorsed by nonpsychiatric populations and do not fall
into any known pattern of deviance, which can help
determine how serious an examinee takes the test as
well as identify malingering
– The K score is associated with defensiveness and
social desirability.
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Personality
• The MMPI has a fourth scale, the Cannot Say
scale (denoted with ?), which functions as a
frequency count of the number of items to
which the examinee responded cannot say or
failed to mark any response.
– The validity of an answer sheet with a cannot say
count of 30 or higher is called into question.
• Harris-Lingoes subscales are groupings of
items into subscales (with labels such as
Brooding) that were designed for internal
consistency.
12-27
Personality
• Following publication it was found that the MMPI
could not be scored into neat diagnostic categories,
and instead Hathaway and McKinley (1943) suggested
a configural interpretation of scores, i.e., interpretation
based on a pattern or profile.
• Paul Meehl (1951) proposed a 2-point code derived
from the numbers of clinical scales on which the
testtaker achieved the highest scores.
• Welsh scores were another popular approach to
scoring and interpretation.
12-28
Personality
• The MMPI-2 is, in general, quite similar to its
predecessor, though some important differences
exist.
– The MMPI-2 was normed on a more representative
standardization sample.
– Some content was rewritten to correct grammatical
errors and make the language more contemporary and
less discriminatory.
– Items were added that addressed topics such as drug
abuse, suicidality, marital adjustment, attitudes toward
work, and Type A behavior patterns.
– Three additional validity scales were added: Back-
Page Infrequency (Fb), True Response Inconsistency
(TRIN), and Variable Response Inconsistency (VRIN).
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Personality
• The MMPI-2 RF was devised in response to two basic
problems with the MMPI-2:
– Overlapping items: per pair of clinical scales, there
was an average of more than six overlapping items in
the MMPI-2.
– A pervasive factor (referred to as anxiety, despair,
malaise, and maladjustment) that was common to most
forms of psychopathology but unique to none.
• One goal of restructuring the MMPI-2 into the MMPI-2
RF was to make the clinical scales more distinctive and
meaningful.
12-30
Personality
• The MMPI-A was developed in response to
skepticism about the applicability of the MMPI
to adolescents.
– It contains 16 basic scares, including 10 clinical
scales and six validity scales.
– It also contains six supplementary scales (dealing
with areas such as drug use and immaturity), 15
content scales (such as scales addressing conduct
problems), 28 Harris-Lingoes scales, and three
scales labeled Social Introversion.
12-31
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 values of a
particular cultural group
– Acculturation begins at birth and proceeds throughout
development.
12-32
• Important to a discussion of acculturation is a
understanding of values
– Instrumental values: guiding principles to help one
attain some objective (e.g., honesty and ambition)
– Terminal values: guiding principles and a mode of
behavior that is an endpoint objective (e.g., a
comfortable life and a sense of accomplishment)
– Kluckhohn (1954, 1960) conceived of values as answers
to key questions with which civilizations must grapple
• For example, in one culture, collectivism is the ideal; in
another, individualism and personal striving is
emphasized.
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• Also important to a discussion of acculturation is the
concept of personal identity, or one’s sense of self.
– Levine and Padilla (1980) defined identification as
a process by which an individual assumes a pattern
of behavior characteristic of other people
• An assessee’s worldview must be considered when
examining personality, their unique way of
interpreting their perceptions as a result of their
experiences, cultural background, and related
variables.
12-34

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Chapter 12

McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2013 McGraw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved.

Developed the Self-Directed Search

Whether the 16 PF measures 16

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