Personality Assessment

Four Contexts for Personality Assessment

Personality assessment should be conducted within four contexts. First, it is essential that school psychologists understand normal and abnormal personality development and apply this information to empirical models that attempt to explain students' social–emotional, behavioral, and affective development. Second, personality assessment must be conducted within an ecological context, recognizing that social, emotional, and affective behavior occurs within a child's or adolescent's interdependent domains of self, home, peers, school, and community. Third, personality assessment in the schools should occur within a context that recognizes that students often are referred for school-based assessment as a function of their (usually, inappropriate) behavior or affect at school, and that the (equally inappropriate) goal of the referral is to identify the student's “psychological deficit” and “fix” him or her. Instead of adopting and reinforcing this perspective, the assessment should evaluate the student within the context of an instructional environment that includes the student, the teacher, the instructional process, and the curricula being delivered.

[Page 382]More specifically, along with a functional assessment of the student's inappropriate behaviors, the assessment also should focus on students' skills and assets, the ways that they develop resilient responses to challenging events and environments, and the enabling conditions that facilitate their growth and development (Gable & colleagues, 1998; Tilly & colleagues, 1998). The assessment, then, provides information that can help psychologists and educators differentiate where the student is making good social, emotional, or behavioral growth, and where he or she is exhibiting inappropriate behavior and/or affect. This approach also must be sensitive to situation- and setting-specific behavior, and it should guide the school psychologist's thinking so that personality assessment becomes (a) an empirically-based problem-solving process, that (b) links assessment directly to intervention, and that (c) integrates referred problems and their needed solutions into a realistic and holistic context.

As a last context, when personality assessment is conducted solely under IDEA, it is usually done to determine either whether the student is eligible for services for emotional disturbances or whether a specific inappropriate act was a manifestation of a behavioral or emotional disability. Relative to eligibility, the best reason to initiate an assessment is the lack of sufficient progress in resolving a student's specific social, emotional, or behavioral concerns that have already been functionally analyzed and addressed (albeit, unsuccessfully) through systematic, classroom-based intervention. Given this, the personality assessment process would build from the functional assessment and intervention data, and move into more intensive analyses including the ecological contexts involving the student. Once again, the primary goal of the assessment is to determine functionally “why” the referred situation is occurring, not “whether” the student qualifies as eligible for services.

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