Personality Assessment Instrument Paper

There are many ways a person can determine what personality type he or she fits into. There are different tests to use or there are other instruments, like self-help books. A person can improve communication when he or she knows what his or her personality type is. The interaction with other people will also improve. Personality tests can be hugely beneficial in improving knowledge of self and other people in motivations, strengths, weaknesses, preferred thinking and working styles, and also strengths and preferred styles for communications, learning, management, being managed, and team-working. The more you understand about your own personality and that of other people, the better able you are to realize how others perceive you, and how they react to your own personality and style. Comparing the different personality assessment instruments can determine which test is better suited for an individual.

One of these personality assessment instruments is the Myer-Briggs personality test. "The Myers-Briggs personality test was created in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers in an attempt to categorize the different personality characteristics of people. The test asks a series of preferential choice questions, with no wrong answers, to help determine the person's tendencies within four categories." (Richards, nd, p. 1) The theory behind the Myer-Briggs test is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment. The categories used in the Myers-Briggs test are extroversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. An individual is assigned to one of the choices in each category. Given the combinations available there are only sixteen possible results for an individual. The sixteen possible results are duty fulfillers, guardians, nurturers, caregivers, mechanics, doers, performers, artists, executives, scientists, visionaries, thinkers, givers, protectors, inspirers, and idealists.

The validity and reliability of the Myers-Briggs test has been proven over the past forty years. The Myers-Briggs test measures what it says it does and produces the same results when given more than once. Many of the other personality tests available today are variations of the Myer-Briggs test. The Myers-Briggs test is derived from a theory from Carl Jung's Psychological Types ideas. The wide-use of this test is proof of the validity and reliability of the results of the test.

Another personality assessment instrument is the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT. "TAT is a projective measure intended to evaluate a person's patterns of thought, attitudes, observational capacity, and emotional responses to ambiguous test materials." (Cramer, 2004, p.5) The TAT was first developed in 1935 by Henry Murray, Christiana Morgan, and their colleagues at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. The early versions of the TAT listed Morgan as the first author, but later versions dropped her name. One of the controversies surrounding the history of the TAT concerns the long and conflict-ridden extramarital relationship between Morgan and Murray, and its reinforcement of the prejudices that existed in the 1930s against women in academic psychology and psychiatry. The TAT consists of a set of cards that portray human figures in a variety of settings and situations. The subject is asked to tell the examiner a story about each card that includes the following elements: the event shown in the picture; what has led up to it; what the characters in the picture are feeling and thinking; and the outcome of the event. The Tat is a projective instrument. This is it asks the test subject to project his or her patterns of thought and emotional responses on to the pictures on the cards. There is not any right or wrong answers. It is all interpretation of the test giver.

The possible errors in interpretation and honesty of the test subject can have an impact on the results of the test and question the validity and reliability of the TAT. The research studies that have used the TAT have indicated that cultural, gender, and class issues must be taken into account when determining whether a specific response to a story card is "abnormal" strictly speaking, or whether it may be a normal response from a person in a particular group. There are two basic approaches to interpreting responses to the TAT, called nomothetic and idiographic respectively. Nomothetic interpretation refers to the practice of establishing norms for answers from subjects in specific age, gender, racial, or educational level groups and then measuring a given subject's responses against those norms. Idiographic interpretation refers to evaluating the unique features of the subject's view of the world and relationships. Most psychologists would classify the TAT as better suited to idiographic than nomothetic interpretation. "Over the years, different psychologists have developed different schemes for interpreting and classifying people's responses to projective test items" (Cervone & Pervin, 2010, p.118). This could affect the results of the test.

The last personality assessment instrument to be discussed is self-help books. "In the last 25 years of the 20th century, sales of self-help books saw a dramatic spike as the industry mushroomed from a fringe niche to a mainstream powerhouse. In the five-year period from 1991 to 1996 alone, sales of self-help books rose over 96%." (Gunnell, Pimlott & Motevalli, 2004, p 3) Experts sometimes refer to the psychological concept known as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to explain the distribution of demand for most self-help products. According to this model, which was advanced by the influential humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow in a 1943 study, individuals must first address their basic physiological and security needs before they can begin to attempt to meet higher-order emotional needs,