Know More About Personality Test

A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report questionnaire (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 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 (MMPI), the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS), among many others. Although popular especially among personnel consultants, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has numerous psychometric deficiencies.

More recently, a number of instruments based on the Five Factor Model of personality have been constructed such as the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. However, the Big Five and related Five Factor Model 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, clinical psychology, forensic psychology, school psychology, career counseling, employment testing, occupational health and safety and customer relationship management.

History of personality test

The origins of personality assessment date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when personality was assessed through phrenology, the measurement of bumps on the human skull, and physiognomy, 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 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 (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 (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, a self-report inventory developed for World War I and used for the psychiatric screening of new draftees.

Examples of personality tests

The first modern personality test was the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, which was first used in 1919. It was designed to help the United States Army screen out recruits who might be susceptible to shell shock.
The Rorschach inkblot test was introduced in 1921 as a way to determine personality by the interpretation of inkblots.
The Thematic Apperception Test 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 was published in 1942 as a way to aid in assessing psychopathology 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). These five scales on the MMPI-2 include aggressiveness, psychoticism, disconstraint, negative emotionality/neuroticism, and introversion/low positive emotionality.
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire designed to measure psychological 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 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.

Personality tests of the five factor model

Different types of the Big Five personality traits:

The NEO PI-R, or the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, 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.