A personality test is a method of assessing human
personality
Personality is the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that are formed from biological and environmental factors, and which change over time. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, ...
constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report
questionnaire
A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions (or other types of prompts) for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study. A research questionnaire is typically a mix ...
(Q-data, in terms of
LOTS data) measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though
Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure.Gillis, J. (2014). ''Psychology's Secret Genius: The Lives and Works ...
with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight (or biased perceptions of others) to downright dissimulation (faking good/faking bad) depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.
The first personality assessment measures were developed in the 1920s and were intended to ease the process of personnel selection, particularly in the armed forces. Since these early efforts, a wide variety of personality scales and questionnaires have been developed, including the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatmen ...
(MMPI), the
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), the
Comrey Personality Scales
The Comrey Personality Scales (also known as Comrey Personality Test or CPT) is a personality test developed by Andrew L. Comrey in 1970. The CPT measures eight main scales and two validity scales. The test is currently distributed by Educational ...
(CPS), among many others. Although popular especially among personnel consultants, the
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign ...
(MBTI) has numerous psychometric deficiencies. More recently, a number of instruments based on the
Five Factor Model
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...
of personality have been constructed such as the
Revised NEO Personality Inventory
The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) is a personality inventory that assesses an individual on five dimensions of personality, the so-called Big Five personality traits. These traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, ext ...
. However, the
Big Five and related
Five Factor Model
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...
have been challenged for accounting for less than two-thirds of the known trait variance in the normal personality sphere alone.
Estimates of how much the personality assessment industry in the US is worth range anywhere from $2 and $4 billion a year (as of 2013). Personality assessment is used in wide a range of contexts, including individual and
relationship counseling
Couples therapy (also couples' counseling, marriage counseling, or marriage therapy) attempts to improve romantic relationships and resolve interpersonal conflicts.
History
Marriage counseling originated in Germany in the 1920s as part of the eu ...
,
clinical psychology
Clinical psychology is an integration of social science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and persona ...
,
forensic psychology
Forensic psychology is the development and application of scientific knowledge and methods to help answer legal questions arising in criminal, civil, contractual, or other judicial proceedings. Forensic psychology includes both research on various ...
,
school psychology
School psychology is a field that applies principles from educational psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, community psychology, and behavior analysis to meet the learning and behavioral health needs of children and adol ...
,
career counseling
Career counseling is a type of advice-giving and support provided by career counselors to their clients, to help the clients manage their journey through life, learning and work changes (career). This includes career exploration, making career c ...
,
employment testing
Employment testing is the practice of administering written, oral, or other tests as a means of determining the suitability or desirability of a job applicant. The premise is that if scores on a test correlate with job performance, then it is eco ...
,
occupational health and safety
Occupational safety and health (OSH), also commonly referred to as occupational health and safety (OHS), occupational health, or occupational safety, is a multidisciplinary field concerned with the safety, health, and welfare of people at wor ...
and
customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.
CRM systems compile data from a r ...
.
History
The origins of personality assessment date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when personality was assessed through
phrenology
Phrenology () is a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.Wihe, J. V. (2002). "Science and Pseudoscience: A Primer in Critical Thinking." In ''Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience'', pp. 195–203. C ...
, the measurement of bumps on the human skull, and
physiognomy
Physiognomy (from the Greek , , meaning "nature", and , meaning "judge" or "interpreter") is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. The term can also refer to the genera ...
, which assessed personality based on a person's outer appearances.
Sir Francis Galton took another approach to assessing personality late in the 19th century. Based on the lexical hypothesis, Galton estimated the number of adjectives that described personality in the English dictionary.
Galton's list was eventually refined by
Louis Leon Thurstone
Louis Leon Thurstone (29 May 1887 – 29 September 1955) was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his cont ...
to 60 words that were commonly used for describing personality at the time.
Through factor analyzing responses from 1300 participants, Thurstone was able to reduce this severely restricted pool of 60 adjectives into seven common factors.
This procedure of factor analyzing common adjectives was later utilized by
Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure.Gillis, J. (2014). ''Psychology's Secret Genius: The Lives and Works ...
(7th most highly cited psychologist of the 20th Century—based on the peer-reviewed journal literature), who subsequently utilized a data set of over 4000 affect terms from the English dictionary that eventually resulted in construction of the
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) which also measured up to eight second-stratum personality factors. Of the many introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report instruments constructed to measure the putative Big Five personality dimensions, perhaps the most popular has been the
Revised NEO Personality Inventory
The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) is a personality inventory that assesses an individual on five dimensions of personality, the so-called Big Five personality traits. These traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, ext ...
(NEO-PI-R)
However, the psychometric properties of the NEO-PI-R (including its factor analytic/construct validity) has been severely criticized.
Another early personality instrument was the
Woodworth Personal Data Sheet The Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, sometimes known as the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory was a personality test, commonly cited as the first personality test, developed by Robert S. Woodworth during World War I for the United States Army. It wa ...
, a
self-report inventory
A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator. Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, sympto ...
developed for
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
and used for the psychiatric screening of new draftees.
Overview
There are many different types of personality assessment measures. The
self-report inventory
A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator. Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, sympto ...
involves administration of many items requiring respondents to introspectively assess their own personality characteristics. This is highly subjective, and because of item transparency, such Q-data measures are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion. Respondents are required to indicate their level of agreement with each item using a
Likert scale
A Likert scale ( , commonly mispronounced as ) is a psychometric scale commonly involved in research that employs questionnaires. It is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research, such that the term (or more fully the ...
or, more accurately, a Likert-type scale. An item on a personality questionnaire, for example, might ask respondents to rate the degree to which they agree with the statement "I talk to a lot of different people at parties" on a scale from 1 ("strongly disagree") to 5 ("strongly agree").
Historically, the most widely used multidimensional personality instrument is the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatmen ...
(MMPI), a psychopathology instrument originally designed to assess archaic psychiatric
nosology
Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that ...
.
In addition to subjective/introspective self-report inventories, there are several other methods for assessing human personality, including observational measures, ratings of others, projective tests (e.g., the
TAT and
Ink Blots), and actual objective performance tests (T-data).
Topics
Norms
The meaning of ''personality test'' scores are difficult to interpret in a direct sense. For this reason substantial effort is made by producers of personality tests to produce norms to provide a comparative basis for interpreting a respondent's test scores. Common formats for these norms include
percentile
In statistics, a ''k''-th percentile (percentile score or centile) is a score ''below which'' a given percentage ''k'' of scores in its frequency distribution falls (exclusive definition) or a score ''at or below which'' a given percentage fall ...
ranks,
z scores,
sten scores, and other forms of standardized scores.
Test development
A substantial amount of research and thinking has gone into the topic of personality test development. Development of personality tests tends to be an iterative process whereby a test is progressively refined. Test development can proceed on theoretical or statistical grounds. There are three commonly used general strategies: Inductive, Deductive, and Empirical. Scales created today will often incorporate elements of all three methods.
Deductive assessment construction begins by selecting a domain or construct to measure.
The construct is thoroughly defined by experts and items are created which fully represent all the attributes of the construct definition.
Test items are then selected or eliminated based upon which will result in the strongest internal validity for the scale. Measures created through deductive methodology are equally valid and take significantly less time to construct compared to inductive and empirical measures. The clearly defined and face valid questions that result from this process make them easy for the person taking the assessment to understand. Although subtle items can be created through the deductive process, these measure often are not as capable of detecting lying as other methods of personality assessment construction.
Inductive assessment construction begins with the creation of a multitude of diverse items. The items created for an inductive measure to not intended to represent any theory or construct in particular. Once the items have been created they are administered to a large group of participants. This allows researchers to analyze natural relationships among the questions and label components of the scale based upon how the questions group together. Several statistical techniques can be used to determine the constructs assessed by the measure. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis are two of the most common data reduction techniques that allow researchers to create scales from responses on the initial items.
The
Five Factor Model
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...
of personality was developed using this method. Advanced statistical methods include the opportunity to discover previously unidentified or unexpected relationships between items or constructs. It also may allow for the development of subtle items that prevent test takers from knowing what is being measured and may represent the actual structure of a construct better than a pre-developed theory. Criticisms include a vulnerability to finding item relationships that do not apply to a broader population, difficulty identifying what may be measured in each component because of confusing item relationships, or constructs that were not fully addressed by the originally created questions.
Empirically derived personality assessments require statistical techniques. One of the central goals of empirical personality assessment is to create a test that validly discriminates between two distinct dimensions of personality. Empirical tests can take a great deal of time to construct. In order to ensure that the test is measuring what it is purported to measure, psychologists first collect data through self- or observer reports, ideally from a large number of participants.
Self- vs. observer-reports
A personality test can be administered directly to the person being evaluated or to an observer. In a self-report, the individual responds to personality items as they pertain to the person himself/herself. Self-reports are commonly used. In an observer-report, a person responds to the personality items as those items pertain to someone else. To produce the most accurate results, the observer needs to know the individual being evaluated. Combining the scores of a self-report and an observer report can reduce error, providing a more accurate depiction of the person being evaluated. Self- and observer-reports tend to yield similar results, supporting their validity.
Direct observation reports
Direct observation involves a second party directly observing and evaluating someone else. The second party observes how the target of the observation behaves in certain situations (e.g., how a child behaves in a schoolyard during recess). The observations can take place in a natural (e.g., a schoolyard) or artificial setting (social psychology laboratory). Direct observation can help identify job applicants (e.g., work samples) who are likely to be successful or maternal attachment in young children (e.g.,
Mary Ainsworth
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth (; December 1, 1913 – March 21, 1999) was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early em ...
's
strange situation
The strange situation is a procedure devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to observe attachment in children, that is relationships between a caregiver and child. It applies to children between the age of nine and 30 months. Broadly speaking, the ...
). The object of the method is to directly observe ''genuine'' behaviors in the target. A limitation of direct observation is that the target persons may change their behavior because they know that they are being observed. A second limitation is that some behavioral traits are more difficult to observe (e.g., sincerity) than others (e.g., sociability). A third limitation is that direct observation is more expensive and time-consuming than a number of other methods (e.g.,
self-report
A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A ''self-report'' is any method which involves asking a participant ab ...
).
Personality tests in the workplace
Though personality tests date back to the early 20th century, it was not until 1988 when it became illegal in the United States for employers to use polygraphs that they began to more broadly utilize personality tests. The idea behind these personality tests is that employers can reduce their turnover rates and prevent economic losses in the form of people prone to thievery, drug abuse, emotional disorders or violence in the workplace. There is a chance that an applicant may fake responses to personality test items in order to make the applicant appear more attractive to the employing organization than the individual actually is.
Personality tests are often part of
management consulting
Management consulting is the practice of providing consulting services to organizations to improve their performance or in any way to assist in achieving organizational objectives. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultan ...
services, as having a certification to conduct a particular test is a way for a consultant to offer an additional service and demonstrate their qualifications. The tests are used in narrowing down potential job applicants, as well as which employees are more suitable for promotion.
The United States federal government is a notable customer of personality test services outside the private sector with approximately 200 federal agencies, including the military, using personality assessment services.
Despite evidence showing personality tests as one of the least reliable metrics in assessing job applicants, they remain popular as a way to screen candidates.
Test evaluation
There are several criteria for evaluating a ''personality test''. For a test to be successful, users need to be sure that (a) test results are replicable and (b) the test measures what its creators purport it to measure. Fundamentally, a ''personality test'' is expected to demonstrate
reliability
Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Computing
* Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage
* High availability
* Reliability (computer networking), a ...
and
validity. Reliability refers to the extent to which test scores, if a test were administered to a sample twice within a short period of time, would be similar in both administrations. Test validity refers to evidence that a test measures the
construct (e.g., neuroticism) that it is supposed to measure.
Analysis
A respondent's response is used to compute the analysis. Analysis of data is a long process. Two major theories are used here: classical test theory (CTT), used for the observed score; and item response theory (IRT), "a family of models for persons' responses to items". The two theories focus upon different 'levels' of responses and researchers are implored to use both in order to fully appreciate their results.
Non-response
Firstly, item non-response needs to be addressed. Non-response can either be ''unit'', where a person gave no response for any of the ''n'' items, or ''item'', i.e., individual question. Unit non-response is generally dealt with exclusion.
Item non-response should be handled by
imputation – the method used can vary between test and questionnaire items.
Scoring
The conventional method of scoring items is to assign '0' for an incorrect answer and '1' for a correct answer. When tests have more response options (e.g. multiple choice items) '0' when incorrect, '1' for being partly correct and '2' for being correct.
Personality tests can also be scored using a dimensional (normative) or a typological (ipsative) approach. Dimensional approaches such as the Big 5 describe personality as a set of continuous dimensions on which individuals differ. From the item scores, an 'observed' score is computed. This is generally found by summing the un-weighted item scores.
Criticism and controversy
Personality versus social factors
In the 1960s and 1970s some psychologists dismissed the whole idea of personality, considering much behaviour to be context-specific.
[ archived a]
/ref> This idea was supported by the fact that personality often does not predict behaviour in specific contexts. However, more extensive research has shown that when behaviour is aggregated across contexts, that personality can be a mostly good predictor of behaviour. Almost all psychologists now acknowledge that both social and individual difference factors (i.e., personality) influence behaviour. The debate is currently more around the relative importance of each of these factors and how these factors interact.
Respondent faking
One problem with self-report measures of personality is that respondents are often able to distort their responses.
Several meta-analyses show that people are able to substantially change their scores on personality tests when such tests are taken under high-stakes conditions, such as part of a job selection procedure.
Work in experimental settings has also shown that when student samples have been asked to deliberately fake on a personality test, they clearly demonstrated that they are capable of doing so.
Hogan, Barett and Hogan (2007) analyzed data of 5,266 applicants who did a personality test based on the Big Five. At the first application the applicants were rejected. After six months the applicants reapplied and completed the same personality test. The answers on the personality tests were compared and there was no significant difference between the answers.
So in practice, most people do not significantly distort. Nevertheless, a researcher has to be prepared for such possibilities. Also, sometimes participants think that tests results are more valid than they really are because they like the results that they get. People want to believe that the positive traits that the test results say they possess are in fact present in their personality. This leads to distorted results of people's sentiments on the validity of such tests.
Several strategies have been adopted for reducing respondent faking. One strategy involves providing a warning on the test that methods exist for detecting faking and that detection will result in negative consequences for the respondent (e.g., not being considered for the job). Forced choice item formats (ipsative In psychology, ipsative questionnaires (; from Latin: ''ipse'', 'of the self') are those where the sum of scale scores from each respondent adds to a constant value. Sometimes called a forced-choice scale, this measure contrasts Likert-type scales ...
testing) have been adopted which require respondents to choose between alternatives of equal social desirability. Social desirability and lie scales are often included which detect certain patterns of responses, although these are often confounded by true variability in social desirability.
More recently, Item Response Theory
In psychometrics, item response theory (IRT) (also known as latent trait theory, strong true score theory, or modern mental test theory) is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and scoring of tests, questionnaires, and similar instruments measuring ...
approaches have been adopted with some success in identifying item response profiles that flag fakers. Other researchers are looking at the timing of responses on electronically administered tests to assess faking. While people can fake in practice they seldom do so to any significant level. To successfully fake means knowing what the ideal answer would be. Even with something as simple as assertiveness people who are unassertive and try to appear assertive often endorse the wrong items. This is because unassertive people confuse assertion with aggression, anger, oppositional behavior, etc.
Psychological research
Research on the importance of personality and intelligence in education shows evidence that when others provide the personality rating, rather than providing a self-rating, the outcome is nearly four times more accurate for predicting grades.
Additional applications
The MBTI questionnaire is a popular tool for people to use as part of self-examination or to find a shorthand to describe how they relate to others in society. It is well known from its widespread adoption in hiring practices, but popular among individuals for its focus exclusively on positive traits and "types" with memorable names. Some users of the questionnaire self-identify by their personality type on social media and dating profiles. Due to the publisher's strict copyright enforcement, many assessments come from free websites which provide modified tests based on the framework.
Unscientific personality type quizzes are also a common form of entertainment
Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...
. In particular Buzzfeed
BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Ke ...
became well known for publishing user-created quizzes, with personality-style tests often based on deciding which pop culture
Pop or POP may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Pop music, a musical genre Artists
* POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade
* Pop!, a UK pop group
* Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band
Albums
* ''Pop'' ...
character or celebrity the user most resembles.
Dangers
There is an issue of privacy to be of concern forcing applicants to reveal private thoughts and feelings through his or her responses that seem to become a condition for employment. Another danger is the illegal discrimination of certain groups under the guise of a personality test.
In addition to the risks of personality test results being used outside of an appropriate context, they can give inaccurate results when conducted incorrectly. In particular, ipsative In psychology, ipsative questionnaires (; from Latin: ''ipse'', 'of the self') are those where the sum of scale scores from each respondent adds to a constant value. Sometimes called a forced-choice scale, this measure contrasts Likert-type scales ...
personality tests are often misused in recruitment and selection, where they are mistakenly treated as if they were normative
Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. A norm in ...
measures.
Effects of technological advancements on the field
New technological advancements are increasing the possible ways that data can be collected and analyzed, and broadening the types of data that can be used to reliably assess personality. Although qualitative assessments of job-applicants' social media have existed for nearly as long as social media itself, many scientific studies have successfully quantized patterns in social media usage into various metrics to assess personality quantitatively. Smart devices, such as smart phones and smart watches, are also now being used to collect data in new ways and in unprecedented quantities. Also, brain scan technology has dramatically improved, which is now being developed to analyze personalities of individuals extremely accurately.
Aside from the advancing data collection methods, data processing methods are also improving rapidly. Strides in big data and pattern recognition in enormous databases (data mining) have allowed for better data analysis than ever before. Also, this allows for the analysis of large amounts of data that was difficult or impossible to reliably interpret before (for example, from the internet). There are other areas of current work too, such as gamification of personality tests to make the tests more interesting and to lower effects of psychological phenomena that skews personality assessment data.
With new data collection methods comes new ethical concerns, such as over the analysis of one's public data to make assessments on their personality and when consent is needed.
Examples of personality tests
* The first modern personality test was the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet The Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, sometimes known as the Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory was a personality test, commonly cited as the first personality test, developed by Robert S. Woodworth during World War I for the United States Army. It wa ...
, which was first used in 1919. It was designed to help the United States Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, ...
screen out recruits who might be susceptible to shell shock
Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by the British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before PTSD was termed). It is a react ...
.
* The Rorschach inkblot test
The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a p ...
was introduced in 1921 as a way to determine personality by the interpretation of inkblots.
* The Thematic Apperception Test
Thematic apperception test (TAT) is a projective psychological test developed during the 1930s by Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard University. Proponents of the technique assert that subjects' responses, in the narratives they ...
was commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in the 1930s to identify personalities that might be susceptible to being turned by enemy intelligence.
* The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatmen ...
was published in 1942 as a way to aid in assessing psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of abnormal cognition, behaviour, and experiences which differs according to social norms and rests upon a number of constructs that are deemed to be the social norm at any particular era.
Biological psychopathol ...
in a clinical setting. It can also be used to assess the Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5), which are similar to the Five Factor Model (FFM; or Big Five personality traits
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...
). These five scales on the MMPI-2 include aggressiveness, psychoticism, , negative emotionality/neuroticism, and introversion/low positive emotionality.
* Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign ...
(MBTI) is a questionnaire designed to measure psychological
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries bet ...
preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. This 16-type indicator test is based on Carl Jung's ''Psychological Types'', developed during World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
by Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs. The 16-type indicator includes a combination of Extroversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling and Judging-Perceiving. The MBTI utilizes two opposing behavioral divisions on four scales that yields a "personality type".
* OAD Survey is an adjective word list designated to measure seven work related personality traits and job behaviors: Assertiveness-Compliance, Extroversion-Introversion, Patience-Impatience, Detail-Broad, High Versatility-Low Versatility, Low Emotional IQ-High Emotional IQ, Low Creativity-High Creativity. It was first published in 1990 with periodic norm revisions to assure scale validity, reliability, and non-bias.
* Keirsey Temperament Sorter
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire designed to help people better understand themselves and others. It was first introduced in the book ''Please Understand Me''. It is one of the most widely used pers ...
developed by David Keirsey
David West Keirsey (; August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013) was an American psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications, ''Please Understand Me'' (19 ...
is influenced by Isabel Myers sixteen types and Ernst Kretschmer
Ernst Kretschmer (8 October 18888 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist who researched the human constitution and established a typology.
Life
Kretschmer was born in Wüstenrot near Heilbronn. He attended Cannstatt Gymnasium, one of the o ...
's four types.
* The True Colors Test developed by Don Lowry in 1978 is based on the work of David Keirsey in his book, ''Please Understand Me'', as well as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and provides a model for understanding personality types using the colors blue, gold, orange and green to represent four basic personality temperaments.
* The 16PF Questionnaire (16PF) was developed by Raymond Cattell
Raymond Bernard Cattell (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure.Gillis, J. (2014). ''Psychology's Secret Genius: The Lives and Works ...
and his colleagues in the 1940s and 1950s in a search to try to discover the basic traits of human personality using scientific methodology. The test was first published in 1949, and is now in its 5th edition, published in 1994. It is used in a wide variety of settings for individual and marital counseling, career counseling and employee development, in educational settings, and for basic research.
* The EQSQ Test developed by Simon Baron-Cohen
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen (born 15 August 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of ...
, Sally Wheelwright centers on the empathizing-systemizing theory of the male versus the female brain types.
* The Personality and Preference Inventory The Personality and Preference Inventory (PAPI) is a personality test which is used to determine a person's personality traits in the workplace. The questionnaire was designed to reveal a person's behaviours and preferences that may affect their su ...
(PAPI), originally designed by Dr Max Kostick, Professor of Industrial Psychology at Boston State College, in Massachusetts, USA, in the early 1960s evaluates the behaviour and preferred work styles of individuals.
* The Strength Deployment Inventory, developed by Elias Porter in 1971 and is based on his theory of Relationship Awareness. Porter was the first known psychometrician to use colors (Red, Green and Blue) as shortcuts to communicate the results of a personality test.
* The Newcastle Personality Assessor (NPA), created by Daniel Nettle, is a short questionnaire designed to quantify personality on five dimensions: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientious, Agreeableness, and Openness.
* The DISC assessment is based on the research of William Moulton Marston and later work by John Grier, and identifies four personality types: Dominance; Influence; Steadiness and Conscientiousness. It is used widely in Fortune 500 companies, for-profit and non-profit organizations.
* The Winslow Personality Profile measures 24 traits on a decile scale. It has been used in the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and every draft choice for Major League Baseball for the last 30 years and can be taken online for personal development.
* Other personality tests include Forté Profile, Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory
The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory – Fourth Edition (MCMI-IV) is the most recent edition of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. The MCMI is a psychological assessment tool intended to provide information on personality traits and psy ...
, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire
In psychology, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) is a questionnaire to assess the personality traits of a person. It was devised by psychologists Hans Jürgen Eysenck and Sybil B. G. Eysenck.
Hans Eysenck's theory is based primarily on ...
, Swedish Universities Scales of Personality, Edwin E. Wagner's The Hand Test, and Enneagram of Personality
The Enneagram of Personality, or simply the Enneagram (from the Greek words meaning "nine"and meaning something "written" or "drawn", is a model of the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interco ...
.
* The HEXACO Personality Inventory – Revised (HEXACO PI-R) is based on the HEXACO model of personality structure, which consists of six domains, the five domains of the Big Five model, as well as the domain of Honesty-Humility.
* The Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) was developed in September 2012 by the DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders Workgroup with regard to a personality trait model proposed for DSM-5
The ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition'' (DSM-5), is the 2013 update to the '' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'', the taxonomic and diagnostic tool published by the American Psychiatri ...
. The PID-5 includes 25 maladaptive personality traits as determined by Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, and Skodol.
* The Process Communication Model (PCM), developed by Taibi Kahler with NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...
funding, was used to assist with shuttle astronaut selection. Now it is a non-clinical personality assessment, communication and management methodology that is now applied to corporate management, interpersonal communications, education, and real-time analysis of call centre
A call centre ( Commonwealth spelling) or call center (American spelling; see spelling differences) is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. ...
interactions among other uses.
* The Birkman Method (TBM) was developed by Roger W. Birkman in the late 1940s. The instrument consists of ten scales describing "occupational preferences" (Interests), 11 scales describing "effective behaviors" (Usual behavior) and 11 scales describing interpersonal and environmental expectations (Needs). A corresponding set of 11 scale values was derived to describe "less than effective behaviors" (Stress behavior). TBM was created empirically. The psychological model is most closely associated with the work of Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin ( ; 9 September 1890 – 12 February 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career Lewin applied hi ...
. Occupational profiling consists of 22 job families with over 200 associated job titles connected to O*Net.
* The International Personality Item Pool The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) is a public domain collection of items for use in personality tests. It is managed by the Oregon Research Institute.
The pool contains 3,329 items. These items make up more than 250 inventories that m ...
(IPIP) is a public domain set of more than 2000 personality items which can be used to measure many personality variables, including the Five Factor Model.
*The Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey
The Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey (GZTS) is a personality test measuring normal personality developed by J. P. Guilford
Joy Paul Guilford (March 7, 1897 – November 26, 1987) was an American psychologist best remembered for his psycho ...
examined 10 factors that represented normal personality, and was used in both longitudinal studies and to examine the personality profiles of Italian pilots.
Personality tests of the five factor model
Different types of the Big Five personality traits
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English ...
:
* The NEO PI-R, or the Revised NEO Personality Inventory
The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) is a personality inventory that assesses an individual on five dimensions of personality, the so-called Big Five personality traits. These traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, ext ...
, is one of the most significant measures of the Five Factor Model (FFM). The measure was created by Costa and McCrae and contains 240 items in the forms of sentences. Costa and McCrae had divided each of the five domains into six facets each, 30 facets total, and changed the way the FFM is measured.
* The Five-Factor Model Rating Form (FFMRF) was developed by Lynam and Widiger in 2001 as a shorter alternative to the NEO PI-R. The form consists of 30 facets, 6 facets for each of the Big Five factors.
* The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) and the Five Item Personality Inventory (FIPI) are very abbreviated rating forms of the Big Five personality traits.
* The Five Factor Personality Inventory – Children (FFPI-C) was developed to measure personality traits in children based upon the Five Factor Model (FFM).
* The Big Five Inventory (BFI), developed by John, Donahue, and Kentle, is a 44-item self-report questionnaire consisting of adjectives that assess the domains of the Five Factor Model (FFM). The 10-Item Big Five Inventory is a simplified version of the well-established BFI. It is developed to provide a personality inventory under time constraints. The BFI-10 assesses the five dimensions of BFI using only two items each to cut down on length of BFI.
* The Semi-structured Interview for the Assessment of the Five-Factor Model (SIFFM) is the only semi-structured interview intended to measure a personality model or personality disorder. The interview assesses the five domains and 30 facets as presented by the NEO PI-R, and it additional assesses both normal and abnormal extremities of each facet.[Trull, T. J., & Widiger, T. A. (1997). Structured Interview for the Five-Factor Model of Personality. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.]
See also
References
{{Psychologic and psychiatric evaluation and testing
Personality