Personality Assessment

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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 a personality assessment is a highly complex aspect of human psychology that is easily subjected to a variety of interpretations and measurement methods.

Personality assessments come in a wide variety of tests and measures. Myers-Briggs and various other assessments work from both an objective and projective standpoint. Objective and projective tests focus on personality from unique measurement perspectives. 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 an assessment as one choice of projective measurement testing. 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 dependent on the respondent's ability and willingness to self-report, which can cause obscuration and bias. 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 personality can be tested is reliant upon the individual assessing. There are many objective and scientifically validated methods of testing that yield results given in quantitative statistical analysis. Drawbacks to this type of testing include the following:

• Specificity to demographic details of the respondent
• Administration bias may impact the personality assessment
• The administrator fails to properly and objectively administer the test.

Reliability and validity measures that would be appropriate for personality testing include the comparison of various methods and results with those of other measurement instruments.