Seminar 5 - Critiquing personality measurements

Question 1

Projective tests

Answer 1

Strengths
- provides qualitative information about individual’s personality
Limitations
- scoring highly subjective
- fails to produce consistent results
- poor at predicting future behaviour

Question 2

Self-report inventories

Answer 2

Strengths
- standardised and use established personality traits
- predict behaviour and employee fit (to some extent)
Limitations
- ppts may “fake” responses to look better (or worse)
- high number of items leads to loss of interest
- takers not always accurate in self-judgments
- no personality test, by itself, is likely to provide a definitive description of any given individual

Question 3

Problems with self-report assessment

Answer 3

Taking a self-report inventory
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- easy to administer
- popularly used in companies for development purposes
Creating personality assessments that seem accurate is easy
- it can be unclear if assessments are accurate
- Barnum effect
~ when someone belied personality descriptions specifically apply to then, while the description applies to mostly everyone
~ horoscopes?
Faking
- test takers intentionally give misleading information on self-report inventories
- fake good -> presenting themselves as better than they really are
- fake bad -> making themselves look worse than they really are
- test makers build safeguards into tests to reduce faking
MMPI contains cases designed to detect faking -> e.g. “I have never lied”
Can we fake our personality?
- maybe
- research mixed (e.g. Van Hooft, 2012)
- was can fake, but not clear how much we actually do
- faking = less response time, only consider most extreme options
Is it bad?
- would you hire someone who did really well on a personality test if you knew they faked/distorted responses?

Question 4

Likert scale

Answer 4

Rate how each of there statements describe you from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree)

Question 5

Preventing faking

Answer 5

Some suggestions
- correct for social desirability
- behaviour personality tests
- used forced choice response option
- ask for written elaboration
- include warning that fakers can be caught

Question 6

Problems with self-report assessment

Answer 6

Carelessness and sabotage
- ppts can get bored with long tests and select responses randomly
- test takers sometimes report incorrect information to sabotage a research project
- instruction explanation, surveillance, and stressing the importance of the test can reduce the problem
- people may mark random answers on tests without paying attention
~ especially on longer tests
~ some tests include “attention check” items -> e.g. make “strongly agree” for this answer
~ there are also statistical tests to examine effortful responding
Social desirability
- extent to which people present themselves favourably
- problematic for embarking or illegal behaviours
~ alcohol use
~ sexual activity
~ illegal substance use

Question 7

Designing assessments

Answer 7

(personality and beyond)
Keep it simple
- use simple words or language in a survey
- instead of asking “How satisfied do you feel?”, and “How full do you feel?”
Avoid double-barrelled items
- asking ppts for one response to two different questions
- “I enjoy spending time with others and dislike being alone”
use neutral or unbiased language
- do not use offensive language
~ identify those 18 years and older as women and men
~ capitalise back and white to identifying racial groups
Minimise the use of negative wording
- the use of words that indicates the opposite of hat was asked
- “How much do you not like working?” can be rephrased “how much do you dislike working?”
Avoid repetitive responses
- responding the same way to all items in a survey when the director or location of responses in the same location
- reverse coded items: items phrased in opposite direction
Use rating scales consistently
- use only one rating scale as a time (only one scale is possible)
~ forced-choice
~ likert scale
Likert scales
- keep scales between 4 to 7 points
- tears indicate what a rating scale means using anchor points
- e.g. “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”
Minimise items and surgery lengths
- write the survey to be as short and concise as possible, yet still able to convey what is intended to measure
- key goal is to minimise how long it takes, which does not always mean that the number of items in the survey must be small