出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』「2012/06/08 13:33:48」(JST)
| Personality test | |
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| Diagnostics | |
The four temperaments as illustrated by Johann Kaspar Lavater |
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| MeSH | D010556 |
A personality test is a questionnaire or other standardized instrument designed to reveal aspects of an individual's character or psychological makeup. The first personality tests were developed in the early 20th century and were intended to ease the process of personnel selection, particularly in the armed forces. Since these early efforts of these test, a wide variety of personality tests have been developed, notably the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the MMPI, and a number of tests based on the Five Factor Model of personality. Today, personality tests are used in a range of contexts, including individual and relationship counseling, career planning, and employee selection and development.
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There are many different types of personality tests(7). The most common type, the self-report inventory, also commonly referred to as objective personality tests, involves the administration of many questions, or "items", to test-takers who respond by rating the degree to which each item reflects their behaviour, and can be scored objectively. The term item is used because many test questions are not actually questions; they are typically statements on questionnaires that allow respondents to indicate level of agreement (using a Likert scale or, more accurately, a Likert-type scale). A sample item on a personality test, for example, might ask test-takers to rate the degree to which they agree with the statement "I talk to a lot of different people at parties" by using a scale of 1 ("strongly disagree") to 5 ("strongly agree"). The most widely used objective tests of personality is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which was originally designed to distinguish individuals with different psychological problems. Since then, it has become popular as a means of attempting to identify personality characteristics of people in many every-day settings. [1] In addition to self-report inventories, there are many other methods for assessing personality, including observational measures, peer-report studies, and projective tests (e.g. the TAT and Ink Blots).
The meaning of personality test scores are difficult to interpret in a direct sense. For this reason substantial effort is made by producers of personality tests to produce norms to provide a comparative basis for interpreting a respondent's test scores. Common formats for these norms include percentile ranks, z scores, sten scores, and other forms of standardised scores.
A substantial amount of research and thinking has gone into the topic of personality test development. Development of personality tests tends to be an iterative process whereby a test is progressively refined. Test development can proceed on theoretical or statistical grounds. Theoretical strategies can involve taking psychological or other theory to define the content domain and then developing test items that should in principle measure the domain of interest. This can then be accompanied by assessment by experts of the developed items to the defined construct. Statistical strategies are varied. Common strategies involve the use of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to verify that items that are proposed to group together into factors actually do group together empirically. Reliability analysis and Item Response Theory are additional complimentary approaches.
There are several criteria for evaluating a personality test. Fundamentally, a personality test is expected to demonstrate reliability and validity.
A respondent's response is used to compute the analysis. Analysis of data is a long process. Two major theories are used here; Classical test theory (CTT)- used for the observed score (see Lord and Novick, 1968), and item response theory (IRT)- "a family of models for persons' responses to items" (Mellenbergh, 2008); see Hamleton and Swaminathon (1985) for a full summary of IRT. The two theories focus upon different 'levels' of responses and researchers are implored to use both in order to fully appreciate their results.
Non-response
Firstly, item non-response needs to be addressed. Non-response can either be 'unit'- where a person gave no response for any of the n items, or 'item'- i.e., individual question. Unit non-response is generally dealt with exclusion (Mellenbergh, 2008). Item non-response should be handled by imputation- the method used can vary between test and questionnaire items. Literature about the most appropriate method to use and when can be found here (Ader, Mellenbergh & Hand, 2008).
Scoring
The conventional method of scoring items is to assign '0' for an incorrect answer '1' for a correct answer. When tests have more response options (e.g. ordinal-polytomous items)- '0' when incorrect, '1' for being partly correct and '2' for being correct (Mellenbergh, 2008). Personality tests can also be scored using a dimensional (normative) or a typological (ipsative) approach. Dimensional approaches such as the Big 5 describe personality as a set of continuous dimensions on which individuals differ. From the item scores, a 'observed' score is computed. This is generally found by summing the un-weighted item scores.
One problem of a personality test is that the users of the test could only find it accurate because of the subjective validation involved. This is where the person only acknowledges the information that applies to him/her.
Critics have raised issues about the ethics of administering personality tests, especially for non-clinical uses. By the 1960s, tests like the MMPI were being given by companies to employees and applicants as often as to psychiatric patients. Sociologist William H. Whyte was among those who saw the tests as helping to create and perpetuate the oppressive groupthink of "The Organization Man" mid-20th century corporate capitalistic mentality.
This is still relevant to today's job market, where use of Unicru personality tests has become unpopular enough to create a demand for software applications to automate the process of filling them out.[2]
In the 60s and 70s some psychologists dismissed the whole idea of personality, considering much behaviour to be context specific. This idea was supported by the fact that personality often does not predict behaviour in specific contexts. However, more extensive research has shown that when behaviour is aggregated across contexts, that personality can be a modest to good predictor of behaviour. Almost all psychologists now acknowledge that both social and individual difference factors (i.e., personality) influence behaviour. The debate is currently more around the relative importance of each of these factors and how these factors interact.
One problem with self-report measures of personality is that respondents are often able to distort their responses.[3] Emotive tests in particular could in theory become prey to unreliable results due to people striving to pick the answer they feel the best fitting of an ideal character and therefore not their true response. This is particularly problematic in employment contexts and other contexts where important decisions are being made and there is an incentive to present oneself in a favourable manner. Work in experimental settings (e.g., Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999; Martin, Bowen & Hunt, 2002) has also shown that when student samples have been asked to deliberately fake on a personality test, they clearly demonstrated that they are capable of doing so. In practice, however, most people do not significantly distort. Nevertheless, a researcher has to be prepared for such possibilities. Also, sometimes participants think that tests results are more valid than they really are because they like the results that they get. People want to believe that the positive traits that the test results say they possess are in fact present in their personality. This leads to distorted results of people's sentiments on the validity of such tests.
Several strategies have been adopted for reducing respondent faking. One strategy involves providing a warning on the test that methods exist for detecting faking and that detection will result in negative consequences for the respondent (e.g., not being considered for the job). Forced choice item formats (ipsative testing) have been adopted which require respondents to choose between alternatives of equal social desirability. Social desirability and lie scales are often included which detect certain patterns of responses, although these are often confounded by true variability in social desirability. More recently, Item Response Theory approaches have been adopted with some success in identifying item response profiles that flag fakers. Other researchers are looking at the timing of responses on electronically administered tests to assess faking. While people can fake in practice they seldom do so to any significant level. To successfully fake means knowing what the ideal answer would be. Even with something as simple as assertiveness people who are unassertive and try to appear assertive often endorse the wrong items. This is because unassertive people confuse assertion with aggression, anger, oppositional behavior, etc.
Personality testing is frequently used in psychological research to test various theories of personality.
Research published by David Dunning of Cornell University, Chip Heath of Stanford University and Jerry M. Suls of the University of Iowa reveals that observers who are not involved in any type of relationship with an individual are better judges of the individual's relationships and abilities. These workers have studied a large body of investigations into self-evaluation, indicating that individuals may have flawed views about themselves and their social relationships, sometimes leading to decisions that can impact negatively on other persons' lives and/or their own.
A study by American Management Association reveals that 39 percent of companies surveyed use personality testing as part of their hiring process. However, ipsative personality tests are often misused in recruitment and selection, where they are mistakenly treated as if they were normative measures.[4] More people are using personality testing to evaluate their business partners, their dates and their spouses. Salespeople are using personality testing to better understand the needs of their customers and to gain a competitive edge in the closing of deals. College students have started to use personality testing to evaluate their roommates. Lawyers are beginning to use personality testing for criminal behavior analysis, litigation profiling, witness examination and jury selection.
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It is easy for personality test participants to become complacent about their own personal uniqueness and instead become dependent on the description associated with them. This can be potentially dangerous with persons who are already suffering from a form of identity disorder or may be a catalyst to instigate particular behaviors in a person who was previously believed to be of sound mental health. The severity of the damage that individuals can sustain to their personal identity was made clear during the case Wilson v Johnson&Johnson in which the plaintiff (Wilson) sued his former employer (Johnson&Johnson) for irreparable damages that resulted from the over abundance of personality tests being administered in the workplace. Wilson argued that repeated questioning and scrutiny of his personality was a cause of strain and eventually breakdown. In this historic case, Wilson was awarded $4.7 million after jurors agreed that excessive testing caused strain and led to unnecessary scrutiny resulting in personal grief. Similar cases have been tried since and won, but none with such magnitude as this first monumental case that won mental health rights for employees.
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| リンク元 | 「人格検査」 |
| 関連記事 | 「testing」「personality」「test」 |