Personality assessment is more an art form than a science. Generations of clinicians have come up with psychological tests and structured interviews. These are administered under exact conditions and use identical stimuli to gather information from respondents. Thus, any disparity in the responses of the subjects can be attributed to their personalities. Moreover, most tests restrict the repetition of permitted answers. “True” or “false” are the only allowed reactions to the questions. Scoring or keying the results is also an automated process wherein all “true” responses get one or more points on one or more scales and all “false” responses get none. This limits the involvement of the diagnostician to the interpretation of the test results. Admittedly, interpretation is arguably more important than data gathering. Thus, inevitably biased human input cannot be avoided in the process of personality assessment and evaluation. But its pernicious effect is somehow minimized by the systematic and impartial nature of the underlying instruments (tests). Still, rather than rely on one questionnaire and its interpretation, most practitioners administer a set of well arranged tests and structured interviews. These often vary in important aspects: their response formats, stimuli, procedures of administration, and scoring methodology. Moreover, in order to establish a test’s reliability, many diagnosticians administer it repeatedly to the same client at varying intervals. If the interpreted results are more or less the same, the test is said to be reliable. The outcomes of various tests must fit in with each other. In Short, they must provide a consistent and continued picture. If one test yields readings that are constantly at odds with the results of other questionnaires or interviews, it may not be reliable. In other words, it may not be measuring what it claims to be measuring. Thus, a test quantifying one’s grandiosity must conform to the scores of tests which measure reluctance to admit failings or propensity to present a socially desirable and inflated facade (“False Self”). If a grandiosity test is positively related to irrelevant, conceptually independent traits, such as intelligence or depression, it does not render it valid. Most tests are either objective or projective. The psychologist George Kelly offered this tongue-in-cheek definition: When the subject is asked to guess what the examiner is thinking, we call it an objective test; when the examiner tries to guess what the subject is thinking, we call it a projective device.” The scoring of objective tests is always computer controlled. Examples of such standardized instruments include the MMPI-II, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory II. Of course, a human finally gets the meaning of the data gathered by these questionnaires. Interpretation ultimately depends on the knowledge, training, experience, skills, and natural gifts of the therapist. Projective tests are far less structured and thus a lot more unreliable. As L. K.Frank observed in a 1939 article titled “Projective methods for the study of personality.
Personality tests are necessary to analyze the conscious as well as unconscious capabilities of the human mind and its response to different life scenarios.
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