Personality Assessment and Theories Thomas J. Miller III BEH/225 October 21, 2011 Tamara Reeves Personality Assessment and Theories Personality is a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior that develop over time and situations (Morris & Maisto, 2002).
Personalities distinguish people from one another. Many factors develop individual’s personality. One major contributor to personality is family. Personality is developed through morals and values installed by parents at an early age.
Our personality can be assessed or measured, through four basic tools: the personal interview; direct observation of behavior; objectives tests; and projective test (Morris & Maisto, 2002). The personal interview deals with conversation directed toward a purpose. The purpose is to collect information on the person being interview in order to determine an assessment.
Some of the interview may be unstructured, which are questions on any material and do not follow a pattern. The other type of interview is a structured one where the questions are scripted and follow a format designed by the interviewer (Morris & Maisto. 002). Another way to measure a person’s personality is by observing them.
Direct observation views a person’s behavior in everyday situations within a time frame. Direct observation is effective when the observer is not bias toward the behavior of the test subject. However some observers may interpret someone’s behavior differently. The theory of social learning relates to direct observation because it view how situations influence behavior and to see how that behavior affect others (Morris & Maisto, 2002).Psychologists use objective tests that are written and scored based on a standard procedure.
The tests are set up for assessing personality using “True” or “False” or multiple choices formats (Morris & Maisto, 2002). The theory of trait is similar to objective tests because of the accurate measuring of personality that’s points out the way a person think, feel, or act. The last assessment of personality is protective test. Projective tests are flexible and given in a relax setting.
Projective tests llow the individual to respond without feeling overwhelmed. A well known project test is the Rorschach test (Morris & Maisto, 2002). The Rorschach test is a series of inkblot designs on a white card. The test subject is asked to determine what he or she sees from the inkblot design.
The theory related to the project test as well as the personal interview is psychodynamics. Both project test and personal interview deals with the unconscious thoughts of a person. The Myers-Briggs assessment test I took online was an objective test.It contained different characteristics and you are given scale from least accurate to most accurate to choose from. The test result stated that I was reliable and somewhat judgmental.
I do not think a test like this is an accurate assessment of one’s personality. A true way of determining, or measuring, a person personality is by that person action or behavior in certain situations. Reference Morris, C. G.
, & Maisto, A. A. (2002). Psychology: An introduction (12th ed. ). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
