Personality Assessments
The intention of this guide is to make you familiar with basics of personality assessments. It will touch not only upon how to answer questions in these tests but also it provides with useful overview of how personality is understood, how it is measured and what one can expect from such psychometric measures. Having the basic understanding of these areas will help you greatly to correctly approach these selection tests. Click on each of the links below to go to your topic of interest.
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What are personality assessments
The main aim of this section is to provide brief introduction to these tests and answer several questions surrounding these measures.
- What they are
- What is the format and task
- What they measure
- What application they have
- Why an employer might want to use them
How personality assessments work
Often these assessments are designed to assess how normal or typical person is by comparing individual scores to scores that would be normally expected of people of that population. This chapter will provide you some general guidelines as how these measurements assess your characteristics and qualities. You will learn:
- How these assessments predict human behaviour
- What meaning they have for employer
- What kind of assessments tend to be frequently administered
Major approaches to personality assessments
There are different views as how psychologists view the human personality. A debate still continues whether it is made of multiple number of traits that allow to predict human behaviour across situations or whether each person responds differently to solve problems in variety of circumstances. This section briefly reviews how it is understood by different groups of psychologists and how trait perspective and socio-cognitive approach apply to this concept.
This approach tends to emphasise general similarities of human beings. It uses quantitative statistical methods to measure personality. Proponents of this view gather individual data and make group measurements to look for general differences between people. Hence personality measures under this approach focus on comparing individual scores to that of a population and tend to categorise individuals. This chapter will examine this view in more depth and provide introduction to major dimensions and its measures.
This approach on the other hand is concerned with exploring individuality and human differences. It aims to provide a detailed understanding of one person as a complete human being rather than placing emphasis on groups. Assessments in this scope tend to focus on measuring characteristics of single person. This chapter reviews this approach in great detail and touches upon prestigious theories associated with this approach.
These theories make the foundation of personality theories suggesting that humans can be classified into few defined types depending upon their behavioural characteristics, somatic structure or traits. This part will review the main type and trait theories such as:
- Gordon Allport’s theory
- Raymond Cattell’s 16 PF
- Hans Eyensck’s questionnaire
These theories have become one of the most discussed and researched theoretical explanation of human behaviour of individuals. Closely associated with idiographic view learning theories propose that individual personality is shaped through observation, behavioural reinforcement or punishment. In this chapter you can gain an understanding of:
- Bandura social learning theory
- Operant learning theory
- Erikson’s eight stages of development