Measuring Personality

6 Key excerpts on "Measuring Personality"

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  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Personality, Individual Differences and Intelligence

  • Nick Haslam, Luke Smillie, John Song(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  At this point in the book you could be forgiven for thinking that psychologists are interested in personality only for the purposes of academic research and theorizing. However, this view is quite mistaken. In the course of their professional activities, many psychologists apply personality theory and research in a wide variety of practical contexts. Industrial and organizational psychologists frequently take personality into account in personnel selection, looking for dependable employees who will not steal, be frequently absent, or cause accidents and disciplinary problems. Counselling psychologists assess their clients’ personalities when advising them about career choices or solutions to life problems. Clinical psychologists often try to improve their understanding and treatment of their patients by evaluating the personality traits and dynamics in which their symptoms are embedded.

  If personality information is to be used in any of these applied settings, psychologists must have systematic procedures for obtaining it. As you may have guessed from the title of this chapter, the development of assessment procedures is a major preoccupation of personality psychologists. Over the years, a huge variety of methods has emerged for assessing personality characteristics, and many psychologists have devoted themselves to studying the complex issues surrounding personality measurement. In this chapter, we will explore the alternative methods of personality assessment that are available and consider their advantages and disadvantages. Before examining the details of these methods, however, it is useful to step back for a little while and consider the broader aims of personality measurement.

  Measuring Personality

  At first blush, the thought of measuring something as elusive as personality may seem foolish or even absurd, like trying to take the temperature of happiness or to weigh beauty. After all, personality characteristics are not quantities that can be directly perceived, and often they seem to be more like concepts dreamed up in the minds of psychological theorists than attributes of actual people. We also know that two people can often have quite different opinions about the personality of a shared acquaintance, suggesting that judgements of personality are quite subjective. In short, personality characteristics appear on the surface to be unlikely candidates for measurement because they are unobservable, because they are theoretical ‘constructs’, and because they are in the eye of the beholder. For these reasons the general public is often sceptical about the idea of Measuring Personality and other psychological variables, imagining that it amounts to measuring the unmeasurable.

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  Personality

  The Psychometric View

  • Paul Kline(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Measurement of personality Personality tests Since the early days of psychology, there have been attempts to measure personality, with a variety of different kinds of tests. As a result of this considerable research effort, in the modern study of personality there are now three kinds of psychological test in general use: personality questionnaires or inventories (these terms are absolutely interchangeable); projective tests; and objective tests. Before describing these different types of personality tests, a few more general points about psychological measurement need to be made, thus enabling a fine examination of personality measurement. The characteristics of good psychological tests Psychometrics is the study of individual differences by means of psychological tests. Psychometricians, as specialists in measurement, attempt to produce tests with certain key features and these are set out below. They are the essentials of precise measurement and are thus critical for the proper application of the scientific method. All good tests should be highly reliable, valid, discriminating and have good norms. The meaning of these terms will now be discussed. To do this, however, a number of concepts require some explanation. Universe of items Any set of items in a test is assumed to be a random sample from a universe of relevant items. This universe is, of course, notional and infinite. The better the sample of items the better the test. The score on a psychological test is known as the obtained or the fallible score. This is to be distinguished from the true score. Any fallible score consists of true score + error. True score The true score consists of the score of a subject on the universe of items. This is, therefore, a notional score. However, as shall be seen, it can be estimated from the obtained or fallible score provided that the reliability of the test is known

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  eBook - ePub

  Personality Assessment

  • Robert P. Archer, Steven R. Smith(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introducing Personality Assessment

  STEVEN R. SMITHROBERT P. ARCHER

  Overview and Definition

  “What is he like?” As social beings, we are continuously interested in the behavior and personality of those we meet. We are curious if someone is quiet, honest, proud, anxious, funny, indifferent, perceptive, or introspective. Those characteristics influence our experience of others and affect the quality of our relationships with them. When these characteristics persist to varying degrees over time and across circumstances, we tend to think of them as personality. Certainly, we informally evaluate others’ personalities all the time, but the clinical assessment of personality using psychometrically robust tools is an important component of the professional practice of psychology.

  When one speaks of personality assessment in psychology, activities include the diagnosis of mental illnesses, prediction of behavior, measurement of unconscious processes, and quantification of interpersonal styles and tendencies. Although all of these descriptions may be true for different clinicians working with various client groups, this listing may not accurately capture the full range of modern personality assessment. A general and encompassing definition is provided by Anastasi (1988): “A psychological test is essentially an objective and standardized measure of a sample of behavior” (p. 22). Some psychologists might find this definition too simplistic to capture the multitude of activities involved in assessment, and a broader definition has been proposed by Rorer (1990):

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  Introduction to Psychometric Theory

  • Tenko Raykov, George A. Marcoulides(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1Measurement, Measuring Instruments, and Psychometric Theory

  1.1 Constructs and Their Importance in the Behavioral and Social Sciences

  Measurement pervades almost every aspect of modern society, and measures of various kinds often accompany us throughout much of our lives. Measurement can be considered an activity consisting of the process of assigning numbers to individuals in a systematic way as a means of representing their studied properties. For example, a great variety of individual characteristics, such as achievement, aptitude, or intelligence, are measured frequently by various persons—e.g., teachers, instructors, clinicians, and administrators. Because the results of these measurements can have a profound influence on an individual’s life, it is important to understand how the resulting scores are derived and what the accuracy of the information about examined properties is, which these numbers contain. For the social, behavioral, and educational sciences that this book is mainly directed to, measurement is of paramount relevance. It is indeed very hard for us to imagine how progress in them could evolve without measurement and the appropriate use of measures. Despite its essential importance, however, measurement in these disciplines is plagued by a major problem. This problem lies in the fact that unlike many physical attributes, such as, say, length or mass, behavioral and related attributes cannot be measured directly.

  Widely acknowledged is also the fact that most measurement devices are not perfect. Physical scientists have long recognized this and have been concerned with replication of their measurements many times to obtain results in which they can be confident. Replicated measures can provide the average of a set of recurring results, which may be expected to represent a more veridical estimate of what is being appraised than just a single measure. Unfortunately, in the social, behavioral, and educational disciplines, commonly obtained measurements cannot often be replicated as straightforwardly and confidently as in the physical sciences, and there is no instrument like a ruler or weight scale that could be used to directly measure, say, intelligence, ability, depression, attitude, social cohesion, or alcohol dependence, to name only a few of the entities of special interest in these and related disciplines. Instead, these are only indirectly observable entities, oftentimes called constructs, which can merely be inferred from overt behavior (see discussion below for a stricter definition of ‘construct’). This overt behavior represents (presumably) the construct manifestation. More specifically, observed behaviors—such as performance on certain tests or items of an inventory or self-report, or responses to particular questions in a questionnaire or ability test—may be assumed to be indicative manifestations of these constructs. That is, each construct is a theoretical entity represented by a number of similar manifested behaviors. It is this feature that allows us to consider a construct an abstraction from, and synthesis of, the common features of these manifest behaviors.

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  Individual Differences and Personality

  • Colin Cooper(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  Measuring individual differences

  Introduction

  The previous chapter mentioned the use of a questionnaire to measure self-esteem, but it did not go into any detail about how questionnaires and tests are constructed, used and evaluated. If we are unable to actually measure people’s levels of self-esteem, anxiety, intelligence or other characteristics accurately, then the study of individual differences can never be scientific or quantitative; it will be difficult to test theories, or to assess these characteristics for the purpose of diagnosis, individual guidance or personnel selection. So before studying other theories it seems sensible to pause and to discuss how we can go about measuring individual differences; more detail about designing and using tests and questionnaires is given in Chapters 20 and 21 .

  This chapter thus provides an introduction to psychometrics, the branch of psychology that deals with the measurement of individual differences. It introduces the concepts of trait and state. Various types of psychological test are outlined and the interpretation of individual scores through the use of norms is discussed. Finally, some guidance is given as to how to select a test and use it ethically.

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  The New Psychometrics

  Science, Psychology and Measurement

  • Paul Kline(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 but which refer, in general, to the way we do what we do. Motivational traits, it might be added here for completeness, including moods and transient states, refer to why we do what we do. Indeed, the full power of the psychometric model of human behaviour (Kline, 1980; Cattell, 1981) is that it attempts to predict, real-life behaviour precisely in a regression equation utilising the major factors from these three spheres of ability, personality and motivation.

  If the term 'abilities' refers to those traits which are involved in the solution of problems through information processing, then the status of intelligence becomes clear. It is one of such traits - probably, given its common English usage, the most important. As Kline (1991a) demonstrated in his study of intelligence, there have been numerous definitions of this variable and there is no ready agreement. However, the broad, general definition which I prefer is that intelligence refers to the general reasoning ability which is useful in the solution of problems. I do not want to go beyond this definition. This is because the verbal analysis of concepts and notions is the province of philosophy, valuable in itself, but by no means destined to arrive at the truth.

  As I argued throughout the first part of the book, the whole point of the scientific method is that it appears, in general, in many spheres of human knowledge, to approach the truth more closely than does any other procedure. Psychometrics is an attempt to apply this method to the study of individual differences. Hence I shall rely upon psychometric procedures to establish any more precise definition of intelligence.

  Thus we can say, in summary, that 'intelligence' and 'abilities' refer to those traits involving information processing and used in the solution of problems and that intelligence itself refers to a general reasoning ability. It is highly likely, on the basis of human experience, that there are other, less wide-ranging abilities such as verbal or mathematical ability, and many highly specific ones, such as, for example, in music, sight-reading or chord perception. This is the concept of human abilities which is held in psychometrics. Psychometricians, ever since the first paper by Spearman (1904) on the factor analysis of human abilities, have been concerned with such empirical analyses. It is to their results that we must now turn.

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