Assessing Personality Testing Psychological Testing Psychological tests assess

Assessing Personality Testing

Psychological Testing • Psychological tests assess a person’s abilities, aptitudes, interests or personality based on a systematically obtained sample of behavior. 2 Basic Goals 1. Accurately & consistently reflect a person’s characteristics on some dimension. 2. Predicts a person’s future psychological functioning or behavior.

Personality Assessment Projective Techniques • Interpretation of an ambiguous to trigger projection of one’s inner thoughts and feelings • Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts, and psychological defenses & traits

Rorschach Inkblot Test • Presentation and interpretation of a series of black and white and colored inkblots • Developed in 1921. • Personality test that seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of 10 inkblots • Numerous scoring systems exist

Thematic Apperception Test • Series of pictures depicting ambiguous scenes • Subject is asked to create a story about the scene • Answers are scored based on themes, motives, and anxieties of main character

Drawbacks to Projective Tests • Examiner or test situation may influence individual’s response • Scoring is highly subjective • Tests fail to produce consistent results (reliability problem) • Tests are poor predictors of future behavior (validity problem)

Testing for Traits: Self-Report Inventories

Personality Inventories • Questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors • Used to assess selected personality traits • Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of questions • Person’s responses to standardized questions are compared to established norms.

Validity • The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is suppose to test • Personality inventories offer greater validity than do projective tests (e. g. Rorschach; used by proponents of the humanistic perspective).

Reliability • The extent to which a test yields consistent results, regardless of who gives the test or when or where it is given • Personality inventories are more reliable than projective tests.

MMPI • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) • Most clinically-used personality test • 500 total questions • Originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

MMPI Scoring Profile

MMPI-2 • Revised and updated version of the MMPI • Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales and 15 content scales • Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was intended.

Other Self-Report Inventories • California Personality Inventory (CPI) – assesses personality characteristics in normal populations. • Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF) – Cattell’s test that creates a personality profile on 16 trait dimensions.

Strengths of Self-Reports • Standardized—each person receives same instructions and responds to the same questions • Use of established norms: results are compared to previously established norms and are not subjectively evaluated • Greater reliability and validity than projective tests.

Weaknesses of Self-Reports • Evidence that people can “fake” responses to look better (or worse) • Some people are prone to responding in a set way, whether the item accurately reflects them or not. • Tests contain hundreds of items and become tedious • People may not be good judges of their own behavior