Personality assessment is perhaps more an art than a science. In an attempt to make it as objective and standardized as possible, generations of clinicians came up with psychological tests and structured interviews. These are performed under similar conditions and using identical stimuli in order to elicit information from respondents. And so any differences in the responses of the subjects is attributed to the idiosyncrasies of their personalities.
In addition, most tests restrict the repertory of permitted answers. Allowed “True” or “wrong” are the only responses to the questions in the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory II (MMPI-II), for example. Scoring or keying the results is also an automatic process wherein all “true” answers you have received one or more points on one or more scales and all the “wrong” answers no.
This restricts the involvement of the diagnostician to the interpretation of test results (the scale scores). Admittedly, the interpretation is arguably more important than collecting data. Can be reduced thereby inevitably biased human input is not and can not be avoided in the process of personality development and assessment. But their pernicious effect is somewhat tempered by the systematic and independent nature of the underlying instruments (tests).
But rather than rely on a questionnaire and its interpretation, which manage most of the practitioners on the same subject a series of tests and structured interviews. These often vary in important aspects: their response formats, stimuli, procedures, management and evaluation methodology. Moreover, in order to create a test of reliability, many diagnosticians administer it repeatedly over time to the same customer. If the results are interpreted more or less the same, the test is supposed to be reliable.
The results of various tests must fit in with each other. Taken together, they are consistent and coherent picture. If a test yields values that are constantly at odds with the conclusions of other questionnaires or interviews, it may not be valid. In other words, it can not measure what it claims to measure once.
For example, a test quantifying own grandiosity, the dozens of tests, the reluctance to admit failings or propensity correspond to a socially desirable and inflated facade (“false self”) of this measure. If a grandiosity test is positively irrelevant, conceptually independent properties, such as intelligence or depression related, it is not make it valid.
Most tests are either objective or projective. The psychologist George Kelly offered this tongue-in-cheek definition of the two (processed contained in the book “The Assessment of Human Motives”, by G. Lindzey) in a 1958 article titled “Man’s construction of his alternatives”:
“When the subject is asked to guess what the examiner thinks, we call it an objective test when the examiner to guess what the topic is tempted to think, let’s call it a projective device.”
The scoring of objective tests computerized (no human input). Examples of such standardized instruments include the MMPI-II, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), Millon Clinical Multiaxial and collected the inventory II Of course, one man finally glean the meaning of the data from these questionnaires. Interpretation ultimately depends on the knowledge, training, experience, skills and abilities of the therapist or diagnostician.
Projective tests are far less structured and therefore much less clear. As observed in LKFrank year 1939 article titled “Projective methods for the study of personality”:
“(The patient’s reactions to such tests are projections of his) way of seeing life, his meanings, signficance, patterns, and especially his feelings.”
In projective tests are the answers and scoring is not limited exclusively man-made and includes sentence (and thus a minimum of bias). Some clinicians rarely on the same interpretation and often competing methods of scoring, leading to different results. The diagnostician personality comes into prominent play. The best of these “tests” is known to the Rorschach inkblots sentence.
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