Personality Assessment - Problems of Personality Assessment

The term "Assessment" refers to measurement or evaluation. Personality Assessment refers to the evaluating procedures aimed at describing a person's charactetistic behaviour by categorizing him with respect to some-communicable dimension or dimensions.

Another definition of the 'Personality assessment refers to the process of gathering and organizing information about another person, in the expectation that this information would lead to a better understanding of the person. Understanding another person and his personality typically involves making some predictions about the future behaviour of that person in rather specific terms.

The wise and judicious use of appropriate assessment techniques are invaluable in developing individual and group potential.

Good techniques of assessment fulfill 4 primary criteria: Standardization, Objectivity, Reliability and Validity.

• Standardization : It involves assessing uniform conditions and procedures for administering a test. 
• Objectivity:  refers to the avoidance of subjective bias in assessment if the procedure is objective then all the assessors will present the test in the same way to the subject and will obtain the same score. Objectivity is easier to obtain if responses are clearly delineated. 
• Reliability: refers'to the consistency of scores over time. 
• Validity: refers to the assessment technique whether it measures what it is supposed to measure. 

An examination of standardized assessment procedures in common use show that they tend to meet the following conditions:

1. The stimuli to be used in the assessment process are identical for all the respondents and are always presented in the same fashion. 
2. They are available norms or frequency distribution of responses either formal or informal so that the responses can be assigned to a specific place within an anticipated range.
3. There are 'useful personality and behavioural correlates  to be observed responses. 

Assessment focuses on 

1. Criterion performance: perfomance dependent on some socially defined situation or situations. 
2. Assessment performance: performance in defined assessment situations like tests 
3. Link between these two performances (test validation) 

Different assessment procedures are oriented toward one or the other of these aspects depending on their primary purpose. In criterion performance the primary purpose of assessment is to assess the Individual with respect to a criterion in order to reject or select them. The assessment performance is concerned with validation of techniques themselves and the link between performance is concerned with research in the functioning of the personality. Most of assessmnent procedures pursue more than one purpose at a time, which leads to several drawbacks.

Problems of Assessment

There are two types of factors, which pose problems for the personality assessment. They are the individual characteristics and the differences within the theories. The problem assessment is likely to occur, as different theories of personality have developed specific ways of assessing personality.There is an inadequacy in the definition of personality variable.

Individual Factors: as the personality is defined ultimately in terms of behaviour of the organism and human behaviour is complex, an understanding or personality must include an appreciation of the complexity of human behaviour. There are multiple determinants for any piece of behaviour and these vary from person to person. Complexities also exist because behaviour arises not only from the person but also in relation to the situation.

Secondly behaviour is not always what it appears to be. There are both covert andovert aspects of behaviour,  which should be understood  to get a clear picture of his . behaviour. Since the overt behaviour is different from the covert behaviour, the person will not come out with the covert meaning due to unconscious resistance. At times people cannot explain why they have acted or act in a way that'is contrary to their own expressed wishes.

Further more there may be additional problems such as the effects of the situational. factors on the data obtained from a test. The data may be influenced and distorted by the characteristics of the experiment. To  what extent can one human being measure  the responses of another situation?

A special problem in personality assessment is the problem of reliiability, since behaviour is never stable but always changing according  to the situation. There is also unreliability of the criterion, which represents subjective judgement that vary from criterion to criterion. This unreliability poses serious limitations on the potential validity of the personality assessment.

The designation of the criteria of performance is determined by the circumstances of the assessment and must be taken for granted by the assessors. The assessors and the criteria raters should agree on the criterion index otherwise there would be no validity of the assessment. Some use clinical statistical methods or intuitive methods. for personality assessment.

Another problem in evaluating the validity of the prediction is set by the variations in  the criterion situation attributable to the surrounding conditions called conditional variables in the criterion. In assessment no special reference is made to such conditional factors. But there is an implicit assumption of given normal conditions attached to prediction.

Another condition ignored in assessment is the effusion of time. The predictions are made on the assumption that the state of the individual on relevant variables will remain constant over time. Sometimes change may be observed in the individual together with the potential and assessment may affect these in the future (like subsequent learning maturation) in assessment prediction.

Recommendations

Following the suggestions given below may minimize the various problems of personality assessment.

• Use objective techniques as far as possible for analyzing the criterion for scoring the tests and making predictions. 
• Give careful consideration to the requirements of the criterion and make empirical studies of the link between these requirements and both the test behaviour and criterion behaviour. This is a step in construct validation. 
• Non-empirical or clinical methods of prediction should be used as a preliminary to criterion analysis. 
• Several observers whose opinions should be pooled together arithmetically should make subjective observations.
• The assessors should be validated that. is they should have the ability to judge accurately in the assessment situation.  
• Assessors should be familiar with the criterion situation and take that situation into account while making predictions. 
• Each assessor should handle only two or three units of information and without discussion. 

Summary

Personality assessment refers to the process of collecting and organizing information about. a person with the expectation that this information would help in the better Understanding of the person and also lead to future behaviour predictions about that person. There are different assessment techniques available. The standardized assessment procedures should fulfill 3 criteria.

1. All stimuli used in the assessment are identical and presented in the same way to all the respondents. 
2. Availability of norms for the scoring of the responses
3. Correlation between the behaviour and test'responses.

There are problems posed in the personality assessment such as unreliability on behaviour or criterion used in assessment, problem of variations in the criterion situation, effusion of time and problem of validity of predictions. The assessment can improve the validity of prediction by using multiple tests and multiple assessments and by using objective techniques.