PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

- Personality is tested or measured in many situations. Industry and the military

services, for example, often select persons on the basis of personality test results.
- Who seeks psychotherapy may be given personality tests to identify his problems.
- Personality assessment techniques are also used in mental hospitals and clinics to aid
in diagnosis and to measure improvement after treatment.
- Assessment methods used depends upon the purpose of the assessment.
- 2 types:
o Objective assessment:
 if it produces results that fall into well-defined categories or score
values
 Little or no interpretation is required when an objective procedure is
used.
o Subjective assessment:
 Requires the assessor to make a judgment.
- Main methods are
o Interviews
o rating scales
o projective techniques

THE INTERVIEW

- An interviewer must be both objective and skilled

- most commonly used method of personality assessment
- Interviews are subjective assessments
- In a standardized situation the interviewer asks questions that are prepared in advance.
This is less subjective
- But even in two standardized situations with identical questions a subject may give
different replies to two interviewers. He may regard one as friendly because of his
tone of voice and the other as hostile because of the way he looks. Therefore,
personality assessments based on interviews are not very reliable.
- may also be used to probe the deepest areas of an individual's personality

RATING SCALES

- Rating scales are particularly sensitive to a reviewer's overall impression

- A rating scale is a quantitative technique for making a judgment about some aspect of
personality.
E.g. a nursery-school teacher may be asked to check along the following line
to rate each child for cooperativeness.
- they are easy to use and provide rough data readily

|_______________|_________________|__________________|_________________|
Very Uncooperative Usually Uncooperative Sometimes Cooperative Usually Cooperative Very Cooperative
 - Disadvantages of rating scales:
o "Halo effect" is difficult to avoid. (Rate a person consistently high because of
a favorable general impression or consistently low because of a poor one.)

PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES

- Projective tests elicit responses that have been found typical of certain personalities
- Developed to examine deeply into a subject's personality.
- In a projective test the subject is presented with an ambiguous stimulus. He is asked to
tell what he sees in the stimulus, and he "projects" his personality info in his answers.
1. The Rorschach test:
- Probably the best known of the projective techniques.
- It consists of a series of 10 cards, each of which contains an inkblot.
- Some are in black and white; others are in color.
- The instructions to the subject are brief.
- He is given a card and asked to report what he sees.
- After all the subject's responses are recorded, the examiner asks questions about them
in an attempt to discover what it was about each card that determined the responses.
- Scoring of projective tests is based on norms. A subject's responses are interpreted
differently depending on whether that response is made most often by hospitalized
schizophrenics or whether it is a typical response for college students.
2. Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
- Developed by Morgan and Murray (1935).
- Another widely used projective technique
- This test consists of a series of pictures.
- The subject is asked to make up a story about each one.
- The test is based on the assumption that the themes of a subject's stories reflect his
own needs, fantasies, and aspirations.