Personality Assessment (General)

Introduction

Personality can be viewed as both a composite of physical, psychological, and social qualities that distinguish persons from one another and as a self-regulatory system endowed with proactive properties that enable individuals to interact actively with the environment and to contribute to the course of their own development. The aim of personality assessment, then, is to identify and to evaluate both the distinctive features of each person as they impress themselves upon others and the self-regulative mechanisms that underlie the functioning of personality as a whole system and contribute to its continuity and coherence over time and across situations. Accomplishing these goals requires a wide variety of assessment procedures and techniques. Further diversity in techniques derives from the existence of different conceptions of personality; different theoretical conceptions highlight diverse phenomena ranging from stable personal tendencies to dynamic, affective, and cognitive processes to the management of self and interpersonal relations. Assessors [Page 702]thus adopt different personality assessment aims in different assessment contexts and employ multiple criteria to evaluate the quality of measurement.

The Domain of Personality Assessment

Personality assessment refers to procedures designed to identify and evaluate the enduring psychological qualities, including modes of thinking, feeling and acting, that characterize the person as a self-regulatory system and that distinguish individuals from one another. As such it addresses the cognitive, affective, the moral and volitional component of individual functioning including cognitive abilities and styles, temperament and mood, motives, attitudes and values, habitual behaviours, coping strategies, and self-regulatory mechanisms. Although personality assessment has been often identified with the measurement of quantifiable individual differences, it includes both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Assessment serves both research and practice in its provision of descriptive, predictive, and explanatory information about persons.

Personality assessment plays a critical role in a variety of applied settings in clinical, educational, and organizational psychology, to foster learning and motivation, to prevent and to diagnose psychological suffering, and to promote health and to make the best use of individual potentials. A broader understanding of the basic processes that lie at the basis of individual-environment transactions is made possible by close scrutiny of personality variables (commonly construed as dimensions) that are directly related to those processes.

Contemporary personality assessment is marked by a diversity of assessment methods. Different assessment aims lead investigators to focus on different aspects of individual functioning. Different sources of data and assessment techniques are commonly in use. Some assessors aim to measure overt psychological tendencies, whereas other target internal psychological dynamics. Some focus on the expression and regulation of specific personality dimensions, such as aggression, altruism or emotional intelligence, whereas others focus on sets of behavioural tendencies that might yield a comprehensive description of personality and an understanding of its consistency across space and time. Some employ person-centred strategies that highlight the distinctive patterns of affect, cognition, and behaviour that may recur across individuals or be unique of any individual, whereas others employ variable centred approaches that highlight the influences that specific individual characteristics exert on personality development and adjustment over the course of life and across populations. Many investigators aim to provide global personality assessments that is, assessments of overall behavioural tendencies averaged together across contexts whereas others pursue contextualized descriptions that capture the ways in which different people vary their characteristic responses across settings.

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