Pros and Cons of Personality Assessment

Personality assessment for Mental Health

Personality Assessment

Personality assessment encompasses an array of methods. Their success depends upon both the person being evaluated and on the approach taken – but ultimately it all boils down to personal taste.

Some tests, like the Big Five Inventory, provide a broad picture of one’s personality while other inventories like Rorschach inkblot tests may be more interpretative and focused on specific traits.

Personality Assessment

Projective Tests

Pros: This Personality Assessment test offers fun questions and provides a good snapshot of your personality. Cons: Some answers may feel subjective and depend upon context – for instance, whether or not you feel involved when watching television soap operas could depend on which show is currently playing on television and your mood that day.

Projective tests originate in psychoanalytic theory and utilize one of Freud’s defensive mechanisms – projection – to gauge unconscious thoughts and impulses. One such projection test, called Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), requires participants to describe an ambiguous scene depicted on a card to expose any beliefs or conflicts regarding social situations that they may hold within themselves.

Other projective tests include the Rorschach Inkblot Test, in which participants are presented with an inkblot and asked what they perceive it to be. Also of interest are tree tests which require participants to draw a tree while an examiner evaluates its characteristics such as trunk, branches, roots, leaves knots attention to detail etc.

Behavioral Tests

Behavioral tests measure an individual’s specific behavioral tendencies in response to controlled stimuli. These Personality Assessment tests reveal an individual’s natural preferences and may reveal result orientation, teamwork, conflict management, work delegation or trust-building traits. One popular personality assessment scale is the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R), an evidence-based personality test designed to identify the Big Five personality factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Personality is an intricate system and there are many influences on our behavior that impact how we behave, thus leading to wide variations even between responses to similar situations. Therefore, reliable, objective personality assessments provide recruiters with an opportunity to obtain more accurate snapshots of potential candidates for their company culture, while at the same time using these assessments as an additional screening mechanism against bias such as race or gender disparities and similarity issues in interviewers themselves.

Observational Tests

Many personality assessments rely on observations of other people to measure traits. Such assessments include interviews, ratings, nominations and situational tests; however, these methods require additional resources and professional training in order to be effective.

Self-report personality inventories are one of the most widely utilized types of assessment, such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test, Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. A rating technique called TEMAS utilizes questions that describe various behavioral traits. Informants often collect these ratings; these too can contain response biases which may be overly favorable.

Projective personality tests such as the Rorschach inkblot test require individuals to interpret images and tell stories related to them, in order to assess unconscious processes. While such assessments can provide useful insight into unconscious processes, they are sometimes inaccurate or subjective enough that different people interpret them differently.

Scales

As strengths-based personal development becomes more popular, so does personality assessment research. Personality tests provide professionals with an invaluable way to identify their client’s strengths and reaffirm their sense of self following an adverse event or serious illness.

Many of the most widely-used assessments use rating scales, like MMPI-2 – one of the most widely utilized psychological inventories used clinically – consisting of 567 true/false questions about mental health symptoms, beliefs and attitudes organized into various personality dimensions.

These dimensions of personality can be broken down into personality types, such as openness to experience (OCEAN), conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism. Individuals high on openness tend to be intellectually curious with strong imaginations who may also be spontaneous and changeable while those high in neuroticism tend to be anxious individuals vulnerable to stress with insecure self-images prone to depression.