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| Chapter 5: Personality Assessment I: Personality Testing and Its Consequences |
- Any characteristic pattern of behavior, thought, and emotional experience that exhibits relative consistency across time and situations is part of an individual's personality. These patterns include personality traits as well as psychological attributes such as goals, moods, and strategies.
- Personality assessment is a frequent activity of industrial and clinical psychologists and researchers. Everybody also assesses the personalities of the people they know in daily life.
- An important issue for assessments, whether by psychologists or by laypersons, is the degree to which those assessments are correct. Do they correlate as expected with other assessments of related traits, and can they be used to predict behavior or important life outcomes?
- Some personality tests yield S data and others yield B data, but a more common distinction is between projective tests and objective tests.
- Projective tests try to grant insight into personality by presenting participants with ambiguous stimuli and interpreting the participants' open-ended responses.
- Objective tests ask participants specific questions and assess personality on the basis of the participants' choices among predetermined options such as True or False, and Yes or No.
- Objective tests can be constructed by rational, factor analytic, or empirical methods, and the state of the art is to combine all three methods.
- Some people are uncomfortable with the practice of personality assessment because they see it as an unfair invasion of privacy. However, because people inevitably judge each other's personalities, the real issue is how personality assessment should be done—through informal intuitions or formalized techniques.
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