Conceptualizing The Personality Scale

Professors often assign projects for psychology courses that encourage students to conceptualize how the personality scale fits into psychological theory. Research papers on conceptualizing the personality scale will help you understand how personality falls along a scale of characteristics.

Paper Masters helps you outline a research paper on personality and applying various personality constructs to a scale. You can outline your projects just like you see our writers have done here.

How to Design a Personality Scale

1. Select a personality construct, trait, or characteristic your scale will attempt to measure.
   
2. Carefully review all material (e.g., book chapters, journal articles, etc.) on the personality construct, trait, or characteristic of interest. Your task will be to write a set of items that reflects the construct domain, so try to identify as many aspects or dimensions of the construct as you can. (Note: This is a fundamental step in the scale construction process and is necessary to provide evidence of the validity of your scale.)
   
3. Consider how you will test the reliability and validity of your scale after you have constructed it. For example, you might want to provide construct-related evidence for the validity of your scale. How might you do this?
   
4. Identify the item format you will use (e.g., dichotomous, Likert scale, checklist, etc.). You must use the same format for all items on the scale.
   References (include a minimum of three references)
5. Write 10 items you believe measure the construct of interest. (Note: The majority of your items should be face valid, but you might want to consider incorporating some filler items and/or items that assess response styles.)
   
6. Write a set of demographic items (e.g., gender, age) to accompany your scale.
   
7. Write a set of directions for examinees. These directions will appear at the top of the scale you developed.
   
8. Write a set of instructions for scoring your scale. Be sure to identify items that are reverse-scored. Also, specify what a high or low score on the scale indicates (e.g., greater or lesser degrees of the trait).
9. Administer your scale and additional measures to 5 examinees. Make sure your examinees do not write their names or any other identifying information on the scale.
10. Analyze the scale data, including:
    1. The median, mean and standard deviation of scores
    2. Additional analyses using demographic variables
11. Write an APA style report describing the development and evaluation of your personality scale. The report should contain the following sections:
    1. Introduction (including a description of the construct and the purpose of the study)
    2. Method (including descriptions of participants, an appendix of measures, and procedure used to construct and test the scale)
    3. Results (including a description of specific analyses performed and results)
    4. Discussion (including an evaluation of the properties of the scale you created, how you would revise or improve your scale, and recommendations for further study of the scale)
       

The Personality Scale

Personality refers to that collection of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive traits that, when combined, create a unique psychological portrait. These traits are evidenced and manifested in social and personal contexts, and serve to inform a person's relationships and behaviors. While many theories about personality and its measurement have been posited, it is generally agreed that personality is a highly complex aspect of human psychology that is easily subjected to a variety of interpretations and measurement methods.

The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) is an instrument that uses multiple measures of learning and memory. These measures include immediate and delayed recall, learning rate, recognition, proactive and retroactive interference, primacy, and recency, with specificity toward age, intelligence, and type of population. The RAVLT can provide significant insight into the memory functioning, modes of information acquisition, and learning capacity of the individual tested through its capabilities in effecting the simultaneous study of different memory aspects.

Objective and projective tests focus on personality from unique measurement perspectives. According to Masling, the types of questions that researchers aim to answer regarding personality development and dynamics necessitate the incorporation of projective methods of measurement, and describes the use and interpretation of Rorschach testing as one choice of projective measurement testing. Masling sites one of the positive aspects of projective methods is that they "are relatively free from social desirability effects, none requiring the observer to admit personal failings or problems, unlike the situation with self-report measures".

Objective tests, on the other hand, yield results that are Dependant on the respondent's ability and willingness to self-report, which can cause obscuration and bias (Masling, 2002, p. 412). In this way, objective tests may be less capable of providing answers to some personality questions than projective tests of the same nature.

In the degree to which the cognitive aspects of learning and memory are aspects of personality, the RAVLT might be used in such a capacity. The RAVLT is an objective and scientifically validated method of testing that yields results given to quantitative statistical analysis. Drawbacks to this test may be its specificity to demographic details of the respondent. Administration bias may impact the RAVLT inasmuch as the administrator fails to properly and objectively administer the test. Reliability and validity measures that would be appropriate for this test and projective tests include the comparison of the RAVLT's results with those of other measurement instruments.