Assessment of Personality

Assessment of Personality

• It is a formal effort aimed at understanding personality of an individual.
• Assessment refers to the procedures used to evaluate or differentiate people on the basis of certain characteristics.
• The goal of assessment is to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy.
• Assessment is used to study what a person generally does, or how s/he behaves, in a given situation.
• Assessment is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement, counselling, and other purposes.

Self-report Measures (direct method)

• Suggested by Allport
• A method to assess a person by asking her/him about herself/himself.
• Fairly structured measures, often based on theory, that require subjects to give verbal responses using some kind of rating scale.
• Requires the subject to objectively report her/his own feelings with respect to various items.
• The responses are accepted at their face value.
• They are scored in quantitative terms and interpreted on the basis of norms developed for the test.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

• Widely used as a test in personality assessment.
• Developed by Hathaway and McKinley as helping tool for psychiatric diagnosis.
• Very effective in identifying varieties of psychopathology.
• Its revised version is available as MMPI-2.
• Consists of 567 statements to be judged as ‘true’ or ‘false’ by the subject for her/ him.
• The test is divided into 10 subscales, which seek to diagnose:

1. Hypochondriasis
2. Depression
3. Hysteria
4. Psychopathic deviate
5. Masculinity-femininity
6. Paranoia
7. Psychasthenia
8. Schizophrenia
1. Mania
10. Social introversion

• In India, Mallick and Joshi have developed the Jodhpur Multiphasic Personality Inventory (JMPI) along the lines of MMPI.

Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)

• Developed by Eysenck.
• This test is also widely used.
• This test initially assessed two dimensions of personality, called introverted-extraverted and emotionally stable-emotionally unstable.
• These dimensions are characterised by 32 personality traits.
• Later on, Eysenck added a third dimension, called psychoticism i.e. linked to psychopathology that represents:

1. a lack of feeling for others
2. a tough manner of interacting with people
3. a tendency to defy social conventions.

A person scoring high on this dimension tends to be hostile, egocentric, and antisocial.

Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF)

• Developed by Cattell.
• He identified a large set of personality descriptors, which were subjected to factor analysis to identify the basic personality structure.
• Provides with declarative statements, and the subject responds to a specific situation by choosing from a set of given alternatives.
• Can be used with high school level students as well as with adults.
• Extremely useful in career guidance, vocational exploration, and occupational testing.

Limitations of Self-Report Measures

1. Social Desirability is a tendency on the part of the respondent to endorse items in a socially desirable manner.
2. Acquiescence is a tendency of the subject to agree with items/questions irrespective of their contents. It often appears in the form of saying ‘yes’ to items.

These tendencies render the assessment of personality less reliable.

Projective Techniques (indirect method)

• Developed to assess unconscious motives and feelings.
• Based on the assumption that a less structured or unstructured stimulus or situation will allow the individual to project her/his feelings, desires and needs on to that situation.
• These projections are interpreted by experts.
• Various kinds of stimulus materials and situations for assessing personality are used. Some of them require reporting associations with stimuli (e.g., words, inkblots), some involve story writing around pictures, some require sentence completions, some require expression through drawings, and some require choice of stimuli from a large set of stimuli.
• The nature of stimuli and responses in these techniques share the following features:

1. The stimuli are relatively or fully unstructured and poorly defined.
2. The person being assessed is usually not told about the purpose of assessment and the method of scoring and interpretation.
3. The person is informed that there are no correct or incorrect responses.
4. Each response is considered to reveal a significant aspect of personality.
5. Scoring and interpretation are lengthy and sometimes subjective.

• Projective techniques cannot be scored in any objective manner.
• They generally require qualitative analyses for which a rigorous training is needed.

The Rorschach Inkblot Test

• Developed by Hermann Rorschach.
• Consists of 10 inkblots:

1. 5 of them are in black and white
2. 2 with some red ink
3. 3 in some pastel colours

• The blots are symmetrical in design with a specific shape or form.
• Each blot is printed in the centre of a white cardboard of about 7”´10” size.
• The blots were originally made by dropping ink on a piece of paper and then folding the paper in half (hence called inkblot test).
• The cards are administered individually in two phases:

1. In the first phase, called performance proper, the subjects are shown the cards and are asked to tell what they see in each of them.
2. In the second phase, called inquiry, a detailed report of the response is prepared by asking the subject to tell where, how, and on what basis was a particular response made.

• Fine judgment is necessary to place the subject’s responses in a meaningful context.
• The use and interpretation of this test requires extensive training.
• Computer techniques too have been developed for analysis of data.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

• Developed by Morgan and Murray.
• A little more structured than the Inkblot test.
• Consists of 30 black and white picture cards and one blank card.
• Each picture card depicts one or more people in a variety of situations.
• Each picture is printed on a card.
• Some cards are used with adult males or females. Others are used with boys or girls. Still others are used in some combinations.
• 20 cards are appropriate for a subject, although a lesser number of cards (even five) have also been successfully used.
• The cards are presented one at a time.
• The subject is asked to tell a story describing the situation presented in the picture:

1. What led up to the situation?
2. What is happening at the moment?
3. What will happen in the future?
4. What the characters are feeling and thinking?

• A standard procedure is available for scoring TAT responses.
• The test has been modified for children and for the aged.
• Uma Chaudhury’s Indian adaptation of TAT is also available.

Rosenzweig’s Picture-Frustration Study (P-F Study)

• Developed by Rosenzweig
• To assess how people express aggression in the face of a frustrating situation.
• The test presents with the help of cartoon like pictures a series of situations in which one person frustrates another, or calls attention to a frustrating condition.
• The subject is asked to tell what the other (frustrated) person will say or do.
• The analysis of responses is based on the type and direction of aggression.
• An attempt is made to examine whether the focus is on the frustrating object, or on protection of the frustrated person, or on constructive solution of the problem.
• The direction of aggression may be towards the environment, towards oneself, or it may be tuned off in an attempt to gloss over or evade the situation.
• Pareek has adapted this test for use with the Indian population.

Sentence Completion Test

• This test makes use of a number of incomplete sentences.
• The starting part of the sentence is first presented and the subject has to provide an ending to the sentence.
• The type of endings used by the subjects reflect their attitudes, motivation and conflicts.
• The test provides subjects with several opportunities to reveal their underlying unconscious motivations.
• A few sample items of a sentence completion test are given below:

1. My father_________________.
2. My greatest fear is_________________.
3. The best thing about my mother is _______________.
4. I am proud of ___________________.

Draw-a-Person Test

• It is a simple test in which the subject is asked to draw a person on a sheet of paper. A pencil and eraser is provided to facilitate drawing.
• After the completion of the drawing, the subject is generally asked to draw the figure of an opposite sex person.
• Finally, the subject is asked to make a story about the person as if s/he was a character in a novel or play.
• Some examples of interpretations are as follows:

1. Omission of facial features suggests that the person tries to evade a highly conflict-ridden interpersonal relationship.
2. Graphic emphasis on the neck suggests lack of control over impulses.
3. Disproportionately large head suggests organic brain disease and pre-occupation with headaches.

Advantages of Projective Techniques

1. Helps to understand unconscious motives, deep-rooted conflicts, and emotional complexes of an individual.
2. The analysis of personality with the help of projective techniques appears fairly interesting.

Limitations of Projective Techniques

1. The interpretation of the responses requires sophisticated skills and specialised training.
2. There are problems associated with the reliability of scoring and validity of interpretations.

Behavioural Analysis

• A person’s behaviour in a variety of situations can provide us with meaningful information about her/his personality.
• Observation of behaviour serves as the basis of behavioural analysis.

Interview

• Commonly used method for assessing personality.
• Involves talking to the person being assessed and asking specific questions.
• Diagnostic interviewing generally involves in-depth interviewing which seeks to go beyond the replies given by the person.
• Interviews may be structured or unstructured depending on the purpose or goals of assessment:

1. In unstructured interviews, the interviewer seeks to develop an impression about a person by asking a number of questions. The way a person presents her/ himself and answers the questions carries enough potential to reveal her/his personality.
2. The structured interviews address very specific questions and follow a set procedure. This is often done to make objective comparison of persons being interviewed.

Observation

• Commonly used for the assessment of personality.
• Sophisticated procedure that cannot be carried out by untrained people.
• Requires careful training of the observer.
• Requires a fairly detailed guideline about analysis of behaviours in order to assess the personality of a given person.

Limitations of Observation and Interview methods:

1. Professional training required for collection of useful data through these methods is quite demanding and timeconsuming.
2. Maturity of the psychologist is a precondition for obtaining valid data through these techniques.
3. Mere presence of the observer may contaminate the results. As a stranger, the observer may influence the behaviour of the person being observed and thus not obtain good data.

Behavioural Ratings

• Used for assessment of personality in educational and industrial settings.
• Taken from people who know the assessee intimately and have interacted with her/him over a period of time or have had a chance to observe her/him.
• Attempts to put individuals into certain categories in terms of their behavioural qualities.
• The categories may involve different numbers or descriptive terms.
• Use of numbers or general descriptive adjectives in rating scales always creates confusion for the rater.
• In order to use ratings effectively, the traits should be clearly defined in terms of carefully stated behavioural anchors.

Limitations of Behavioural Ratings:

Halo Effect

1. Raters often display certain biases that colour their judgments of different traits. For eg, most of us are greatly influenced by a single favourable or unfavourable trait. This often forms the basis of a rater’s overall judgment of a person.
2. Raters have a tendency to place individuals either in the middle of the scale (called middle category bias) by avoiding extreme positions, or in the extreme positions (called extreme response bias) by avoiding middle categories on the scale.

Nomination

• Used in obtaining peer assessment.
• Can be used with persons who have been in long-term interaction and who know each other very well.
• In nomination, each person is asked to choose one or more persons of the group with whom s/he would like to work, study, play/participate in any other activity.
• The person may also be asked to specify the reason for her/his choices.
• Analysed to understand the personality and behavioural qualities of the person.
• Found to be highly dependable, although it may also be affected by personal biases.

Situational Tests

• Commonly used test of this kind is the situational stress test.
• Provides us with information about how a person behaves under stressful situations.
• The test requires a person to perform a given task with other persons who are instructed to be non-cooperative and interfering.
• The test involves a kind of role playing.
• The person is instructed to play a role for which s/he is observed.
• A verbal report is also obtained on what s/he was asked to do.
• The situation may be realistic one, or it may be created through a video play.