Personality Assessment

Eric D. Heggestad

Personality assessment is the process of gathering information about an individual to make inferences about personal characteristics including thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Raymond B. Cattell identified three primary sources of obtaining such personality information: life-data, information collected from objective records; test-data, information obtained in constructed situations where a person's behavior can be observed and objectively scored; and questionnaire-data, or information from self-report questionnaires. Each type of data is used to make assessments of personality within contemporary industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology. Common forms of life-data might include information contained in a résumé or an application blank and examinations of court, financial, or driving records in background checks. Test-data would include scores on personality-based dimensions derived from the assessment center method. However, by far the most common form of personality data in I/O psychology is questionnaire-data. Self-report measures of personality can be divided into two broad categories: clinical and nonclinical. Self-report clinical measures, ...

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