Issues with personality tests

What is personality?

Personality refers to the person’s behavior by the way of acting,

thinking, feeling and that makes the person unique in his behavior.it

generally refers to persons internal factors.

What is personality test?

Personality test is something that you access your behavior. It can be of

formal and informal. But most of the cases we do informally. Everybody

have their unique personality. It differs from individual in accessing

personality

How personality test is useful?

A personality test is useful to categorize different kinds of people

reacting to different environment. Additionally, this test is useful for

recruiting the job candidates in terms of following factors,

To assess the persons knowledge

Capable of Problem solving skills.

Changing personality.

To evaluate the effectiveness of therapy.

How to Measure personality?

The personality can be measured in the following ways.

PBT: Paper Based Test is the method of answering questions in

paper with Questions provided in it. It mostly checks the person’s

analytical skills.

Situational exercise. : Situational exercise is the method of

assessing the person’s behavior with respond to some situation. It

dealt with the person individual in solving the problem given in a

situation.

Self-report inventories: Self report inventories are the kind of the

test where the test- takers read the question based on the

understanding of the question they rate it. The most common way

of self-report inventory test is Minnesota Multiphasic Personality

Inventory or MMPI.

Projective test: Projective test is the object or the scenario based

test. The test-taker will be given a scenario and ask to interpret the

situation. The most common way of projective test is Rorschach

Inkblot Test.

Potential problem with personality testing:

The above methods of assessing the personality have their own strength

and weakness.

Self-report personality test is usually conducted for a longtime.

This can make the test-taker get bored and choose the answer in a

random manner without reading the question.

Projective personality test is used with a psychotherapy setting.

Here the therapist will quickly collect the information by observing

the client. For example, If a candidate is being assessed he will

check the person’s tone, body language and the quality of

information.

In this, the problem lies with the interpretation of their responses.

Different therapist will interpret with different analogy of

analyzing the client response.

Apart from other two problems, the person is not always good at

estimating their behavior. They tend to overestimate the factors which as

some importance in it.

Therefore the Two problems in personality testing

Reliability

Accuracy (validity)

What is Reliability?

Reliability gives the consistency of same score on repeated measurement

of personality. The test is reliable only if it as a same score on repeated

measurement. Unfortunately, it is not possible to have same score all the

time.

Types of Reliability:

Inter-rater reliability: Inter-rater reliability is the person is being

assessed with two judges on his test report. Based on the score of

the individual judges and the consistency measurement of score the

raters will determine which category the individual fall into it.

Test-retest reliability: Test-retest reliability is the person being

assessed with same test at different times. This type of reliability

assumes that there is no change in quality of answer even at

different times

Parallel-forms reliability: Parallel-forms reliability evaluates

different questions and question sets that seek to assess the same

construct in a parallel manner.

Inter-consistency reliability: Inter-consistency reliability

evaluates by asking different questions that test the same construct

should give consistent results For example, in project viva the

question is asked in a different manner to get the same answer

consistently.

Factors that influence reliability:

There are number of different factors that can have an influence on the

reliability of a measure. If the measuring variable changes regularly then

the result will not be consistent. For example, if a test is conducted in a

room that is extremely hot, the person will get distracted easily. This is

may also have an impact on reliability measure.

Reliability Vs Validity:

Reliability is different from validity. Validity refers to whether or not a

test really measures what it claims to measure. Reliability is the measure

of precision whereas validity is the measure of accuracy.

Conclusion: Scientific Vs Entertaining

There are different personality assessments test conducted, but

personality scores and personal skills are two different things. The test

can be entertaining and they might even give you a little insight into

your personality, but they are in no way formal, scientific assessments of

personality.