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Ugay - Reliability and Validity
Ugay - Reliability and Validity
BS Psychology 3-A
Reliability and Validity
If I were to pick out a psychology test that would be a “personality test”. One of the earliest forms of
personality tests, known as phrenology, emerged during the late 18th-century and was popularized
during the 19th-century later on psychologist began to determine how many different personalities are
there just like Gordon Allport who proposed that there were more than 4,000 personalities and
Psychologist Raymond Catell who used a statistical technique known as factor analysis and list down
16 different personality factors but Hans Eysenck listed it down to three.
A personality test is used to assess human personality. According to the Wiki, personality is defined as
the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that evolve from biological and
environmental factors. While there is no generally agreed upon definition of personality, most theories
focus on motivation and psychological interactions with one’s environment. There are two basic types
of personality test the self-report inventories and projective test. Self- report inventories is making test
read the questions and then rate how the question or statement applies to them while the projective
test is presenting the test-taker with a vague scene, object, or scenario and asking them to give their
interpretation of the test item. Self-report personality test can be standardized and can establish norms,
they are easy to administer and they have much higher reliability and validity than projective test but
projective test is the one most used by psychotherapist because they can quickly gather information
about the client with these type of test. In evaluating personality test, personalitu instrument is use.
Personality instruments measures samples of behavior, it involves determining reliability and validity.
Its objective is to indicate the conditions under which the methods use do or do not make trustworthy
descriptive and predictive contributions. Though there has been a lot of efforts and progress to
measure personality it still can't be denied that it can be controlled, manipulated and "fakeable". That's
why it is important that you should be honest to your self in taking a personality test.
Personality test have been used for a lot of its different purposes including assessing theories,
evaluating the effectiveness of therapy, diagnosing psychological problems, looking at changes in
personality and screening job candidates but sometimes personality test is also used in forensic setting
to conduct risk assessments, establishing competence and most especially in child custody disputes.
Other utilities of this test is in school psychology, occupational counseling, employment testing and
lastly clinical psychology.
I think that this kind of psychology test is helpful to me and to others because it can help us learn
about ourselves and better understand both our weaknesses and strengths. Whatever result we may
receive on that test we can use it as a guide to know what should we do about ourselves. It helps us
recognize and indicates what is our personality type and I think knowing it greatly benefit to all of us.