Unveiling Personality Assessment: Objective vs. Projective Methods - Free Paper

Introduction

In psychology, 'Personality' attempts to study the behaviors, interests, feelings, goals, and thoughts of ordinary people, thus covering a large section of vital psychological traits. The measurement of these characteristics is diverse. The human set models explore people with clear, known goals and the constant need to achieve them; therefore, asking people what their goals are is relevant (Hassabis, 2014). The 'psychodynamic set model' argues that human beings have no insight into their motives and feelings and that there is an influence of behaviors by systems operating externally. The essential purpose of this essay is to define objective and projective tests, review the traits of objective and projective personality tests by giving three examples of each, moreover, explain the assumptions of projective and objective methods based on empirical research, appraise the study of the technical adequacy of both methods and clarify cultural impacts on the interpretation of both methods.

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The Objective Personality Test

The phrase “objective assessment (test)” is used to mean a psychological assessment that attempts to measure a person’s traits without the external influence of the assessor’s philosophies; hence they are known to be free of rater prejudice. This particular assessment is popularly and commonly used to evaluate personality; these objective tests are standardized following set response tactics such as "TRUE or FALSE" later. The answers are recorded in a predetermined standardized method. In personality assessments, the expression “objective” entails the technique applied to achieve an individual’s answers rather than the answers themselves; additionally, the individual's test answers may be subjective and may be swayed by several rating prejudices (Proyer, 2007). There are various unbiased assessment methods in behavior psychology; one is the "self-report measure" which refers to the data offered by participants about their beliefs or themselves via a questionnaire (question and answer) format.

Common Objective Measures

There are several test formats with each required to offer respondents information about themselves; they utilize numbered scales or multiple-choice responses that may characterize a sturdily disagree range to agree (1-5). The self-report measures are applied to medical and non-medical uses for example aiding diagnostic reasons with career goals. The typical examples used to measure are "The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator," "Neo Pi-R" and the "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Another commonly used approach is "informant ratings" and is described as asking the third party with the knowledge of a particular person to describe that individual's personality traits. For example, in a child's case, the informant might be his or her parent or teacher; moreover, for older participants, their informants are roommates, spouses, friend’s life partners, or employers (Gavett, 2011). The format for informant ratings is the same as self-ratings, it's similar to self-reporting things that may comprise short phrases, complete sentences, or single words.

Self-Ratings and Informant Ratings

Numerous known instruments consist of parallel informant and self-rating models; frequently, it's said to be easy to convert a self-report ratio to be utilized to attain the score of informant ratings. Self-ratings are difficult to gather when informant ratings are generally valuable. An example is cognitively impaired adults or reading young children. There are some benefits with informant ratings compared to say self-ratings, such as an honest informant who truly knows the subject and has observed numerous behavioral samples from the person being rated. Additionally, the judgments conveyed by the informant are presumably not biased like the defensiveness that can falsify self-ratings; informants have strong incentives to be accurate in their verdicts.

Projective Personality Assessments

There is a significant belief that feelings, behaviors, and thoughts operate external to conscious awareness in personality assessment approaches, and early projective tests were based on the "projective hypothesis." For example, when an individual is asked to interpret or describe ambiguous motivations (the understanding of things in different ways), one's answers are influenced by feelings, behaviors, experiences, and non-conscious needs. The phrase projective test can be defined as a form of personality assessment where an individual provides answers to ambiguous incidences (images or words); the essential purpose of these tests is to uncover hidden agendas or emotions that a participant projects onto the assessment with the hope that specific issues will be evaluated through the method of 'psychotherapy.' There are two prominent examples of projective tests and they are the "Thematic Apperception Test” (TAT) and the “Rorschach Inkblot Test” which have been criticized for having low legitimacy and reliability and also lack scientific evidence having to rely on subjective responses from medical personnel (Sartori, 2010).

Common Projective Measures

With tests like Rorschach, procedures like standardization are necessary to ensure that projective tests are slightly useful in measuring psychosis, anxiety, and depression. However, in the Thematic Apperception Test, the standardization of administered tests is absent because it is open-ended, making the assessment low on reliability and legitimacy. Experts have stated that projective tests are not used for an actual degree of personality but are better applied for an informational drive. In the past projective assessment has been seen to be applied in cross-cultural behavior; nevertheless, this particular test was found to be biased, thus reducing its usefulness. Members of different cultural or ethnic groups have been known to have difficulty assessing lifestyles and personalities because they mostly use personality instruments from collected data of a single racial or cultural group. There was an importance to establish more personality assessments that inquiry various factors like nationality, race-level of acculturation, and language.

Objective and Projective Applications

Mark Walker is a seventy-year-old white American man on a chair in the waiting area of his consulter's room office except for Doctor Daniels, a psychiatrist who deals with individuals suffering from depression, stress, emotional misery, and any mental deficiency. Mark has been diagnosed with depression, and it's the first meeting with the Democrats. He gets the chance to enter the doctor's office and sit down on an orange couch, where the doctor is waiting for him; he narrates a brief life story to Daniels, who is listening attentively, declaring he is a widower (his wife died twenty years ago) ex-military and has been more emotional these past months because his daughter the only living relative has passed on and thus became depressed. With the above illustration, objective tests can be useful for Mark to be genuine with his doctor. It can be a challenge for Mark to open up to the doctor; it takes Daniel the willingness to believe everything he is telling him even if he’s lying. One benefit of projective tests is the doctor will probably help the patient because he is a professional while the challenge is for a person to look at you and diagnose you with depression-like Mark for just talking to you is ineffective. With objective tests, the doctor can use self-report measures because Mark uses himself to tell his story. In contrast, in projective tests, the application of reliability can be seen to suggest that the doctor is a professional, and any diagnosis given should be accurate.

References

Proyer, R. T., & Häusler, J. (2007). Assessing behavior in standardized settings. The role of objective personality tests. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology España, 7(2), 537-546. Retrieved from https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/3641/

Sartori, R. (2010). Face validity in personality tests: psychometric instruments and projective techniques in comparison. Quality & quantity, 44(4), 749-759. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11135-009-9224-0

Hassabis, D., Spreng, R. N., Rusu, A. A., Robbins, C. A., Mar, R. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2014). Imagine all the people: How the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior. Cerebral Cortex, 24(8), 1979-1987. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article-abstract/24/8/1979/466213

Gavett, R. A., Dunn, J. E., Stoddard, A., Harty, B., & Weintraub, S. (2011). The Cognitive Change in Women Study (CCW): informant ratings of cognitive change but not self-ratings are associated with neuropsychological performance over three years. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders, 25(4), 305.