Personality Assessment

Question 1

What are four challenges with measuring personality?

Answer 1

Assessment is subjective
Nobody knows everything about the person in an unbiased manner
The person knows they’re being measured
Personality traits aren’t directly observable

Question 2

What is reliability?

Answer 2

Does the measurement yield consistent, dependable, and error-free information?

Question 3

What is validity?

Answer 3

does the measurement assess what it’s intended to assess, and is it useful?

Question 4

What is internal consistency (reliability)?

Answer 4

Do the components of the test cohere?
All test items should correlate with each other

Question 5

What is inter-rater reliabilty?

Answer 5

Does the test provide the same information, no matter who administers it?

Question 6

What is re-test reliability?

Answer 6

Does the test yield similar scores when it is administered to the same person on different occasions?

Question 7

What is content validity?

Answer 7

Does the test cover characteristic it’s meant to be measuring.
Example an arithmetic test should just have addition

Question 8

What is convergent validity?

Answer 8

Does your test correlate appropriately with other tests?

Question 9

What is discriminant validity?

Answer 9

Ensuring that one test doesn’t correlate too strongly with a completely separate test.

Question 10

What is predictive validity?

Answer 10

Do your scores predict a related phenomenon?

Question 11

What are four modes of personality assessment? (IPPI)

Answer 11

Interviews
Personality inventories
Projective tests
Implicit personality tests

Question 12

Why are interviews rarely used in personality assessment?

Answer 12

They’re time consuming and labour-intensive
Subjective (really bad inter-rater reliability)
Prone to many biases

Question 13

When might it be a good idea to use an interview to assess personality?

Answer 13

Particularly for personality disorders
Sometimes non-verbal communication is crucial
Sometimes the person might not be a reliable informant

Question 14

What is a provocative interview style?

Answer 14

Try and provoke a person to act a certain way that only a person with a specific trait would act

BUT most psychologists aren’t that good at acting :(

Question 15

What are inventories?

Answer 15

Self report personality tests
Used the most in assessing personality

Question 16

How do you develop an inventory/ self-report personality test?

Answer 16

Generate way more items than you need
Pilot test the item
Analyse the items and select the best ones
Re-test
Correlate with other tests
Develop norms for score comparison

Question 17

What are lie scales?

Answer 17

They help test the validity of self-report scales.
If you answer a lot of implausible questions to make yourself look good, the test is likely invalid.

Question 18

What are infrequency scales

Answer 18

A way to test for validity on self-report scales
If you answer a question in a very unlikely way, or multiple, you probably are picking random answers, making yourself look worse, or you can’t read.

Question 19

What is the MMPI?

Answer 19

Developed for comprehensive clinical personality assessment
556 items

Question 20

What doe the MMPI 4/8 code result tell us

Answer 20

Non-conforming, resents authority
Issues with impulse control
Insecure
Impaired empathy
Avoids close relationships

Question 21

What are the most common diagnoses for those with a MMPI 4/8 code?

Answer 21

Schizophrenia
Schizoid personality type
Paranoid personality type

Question 22

What are projective personality tests and why were they invented?

Answer 22

Invented to bypass the issues of self-report scales
They’re based on the assumption that personality will be projected onto stimuli without any defensive distortions

Question 23

What is the Thematic Apperception Test?

Answer 23

Person looks at a series of black and white images and tells a story about what’s happening in the picture

The responses are coded for repeated themes in the stories

Question 24

What is the Rorschach Test?

Answer 24

Symmetrical inkblots
Person says what they see in the picture and from what part

Responses scored on various dimensions

Question 25

What are the critiques of projective personality tests?

Answer 25

Time consuming Low inter-rater reliability Predictive validity is weak

Question 26

What are implicit personality tests

Answer 26

Testing based on rapid automatic response In theory these are less biased and unfakeable

Question 27

What is the Implicit Association Test?

Answer 27

Connect self words and not self words To other words related to extraversion and introversion Should connect the ones that resonate more quickly