Recognize and describe common projective tests used in personality assessment. Roberto, Mikhail, and Nat are college friends and all want to be police officers. Roberto is quiet and shy, lacks self-confidence, and usually follows others. He is a kind person, but lacks motivation. Mikhail is loud and boisterous, a leader. He works hard, but is impulsive and drinks too much on the weekends.
He is trustworthy, but sometimes he has difficulty making quick decisions. Of these three men, who would make the best police officer? What qualities and personality factors make someone a good police officer? What makes someone a bad or dangerous police officer?Ī police officer’s job is very high in stress, and law enforcement agencies want to make sure they hire the right people. Personality testing is often used for this purpose-to screen applicants for employment and job training.
Personality tests are also used in criminal cases and custody battles, and to assess psychological disorders. This section explores the best known among the many different types of personality tests. Self-report inventories are a kind of objective test used to assess personality. There are two different strategies to assess personality using objective self-report tests. One is to directly measure a construct in a way that is transparent to the test taker so that individuals recognize what each question is attempting to assess. What do you think the scale below is trying to assess? They typically use multiple-choice items or numbered scales, which represent a range from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). They often are called Likert scales, if there is a neutral midpoint, after their developer, Rensis Likert (1932) (figure below). If you’ve ever taken a survey, you are probably familiar with Likert-type scale questions. Most personality inventories employ these types of response scales. The other strategy is to have questions that do not, on the surface, appear related to the component of personality that is being measured. Individuals already identified as possessing certain characteristics, usually through structured clinical interviews, respond to a large group of questions and patterns of responses are identified. People who have not been assessed by professionals can be identified as likely to possess similar characteristics if they respond in the same pattern as a already established groups. One of the most widely used personality inventories which employs this strategy is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), first published in 1943, with 504 true/false questions, and updated to the MMPI-2 in 1989, with 567 questions. The original MMPI was based on a small, limited sample, composed mostly of Minnesota farmers and psychiatric patients the revised inventory was based on a more representative, national sample to allow for better standardization.