Psychology: Personality Assessment

(ITP-29) Personality Assessment

Abstract: Personality assessment is a proficiency in professional psychology that involves the administration, scoring and interpretation of empirically supported measures of personality traits and styles. There are various ways to assess personality. They can be subjective, projective and objective.

Subjective Methods:

Autobiography: It is the narration by individual given either freely or according to certain subject headings provided by the examiner. It is the source of revealing the self and personality of a person.

Interview: It is the most common method of judging personality. The interaction with the person and letting him or her speak gives a clear picture of the person.

Case history: It gives information about the individual’s parents, grandparents, background or medical history. This method aids in understanding the personality patterns of an individual who is a problem or maladjusted.

Questionnaire: It is another method of assessing personality. The questions provided describe certain traits, emotions or behaviors in situations revealing personality.

Projective tests

Rorschach personality test: It was published by herman rorschach in 1921. It is based on inkblots. It is an individual test in which the subject looks at the 10 ambiguous inkblot’s pictures and describes what they see in each picture.  Their responses help in assessing their personality.

Word Association test: It is also known as non-pictorial projective test. This technique was invented by francis galton in 1879 for use in exploring the individual differences. It is a test in which the participant responds to a stimulus word with the first word that comes to mind.

House Tree Person test: It is a type of test in which the test taker responds to or provides ambiguous, abstract or unstructured stimuli (often in the form of pictures and drawings.) It is used to assess the specific complex personality traits.

Thematic Apperception test: It is based on murray’s theory which distinguishes 28 human needs. The procedure includes presenting a series of pictures to a subject. The subject then has to make a story by seeing the picture. It is useful in comprehensive study and interpretation of personality, behavior disorders, etc.

Objective Tests

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): It is a true and false self-report questionnaire. The heart of this test consists of it’s validity, clinical and content scales. The purpose of mmpi is to assist in distinguishing normal from abnormal groups. Specifically, the test was designed to help in the diagnosis of the major psychiatric and psychological disorders.

California Personality Inventory(CPI): It attempts to evaluate personality in normally adjusted individuals. The test contains 18 scales each of which is grouped into one of four classes. There are class i scales, class ii scales, class iii scales and class iv scales.

Neo-pi-r (big five): This test was developed specifically to measure the big five traits. One innovative feature of this test is its public and private version. The neo-pi-r assesses each of the five major personality dimensions and it also assesses the six sub-dimensions that make up the main dimensions.

16 Personality Factor Questionnaire:

16 personality factor questionnaire was designed by r.b. Cattell. This personality test is based on trait theories. Cattell reduced personality to 16 basic dimensions which he called source traits. He also collected all the adjectives applicable to humans to empirically measure and determines essence of the personality.

Conclusion:

Personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual distinctive character. There are various methods in psychology that aids us to assess the personality or to measure the personal characteristics. These methods can be objective, subjective or projective.

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