Personality and the Way it is Measured - The Psychometrics Forum
Re-thinking Personality and the Way it is Measured
Thursday 16th May 2019
The Naval Club, 38 Hill Street, Mayfair, London W1J 5NS 10am – 4:30pm
Most personality assessment in an organisational setting involves the use of self-report questionnaires, which assume an underlying stable and enduring personality that can be accurately measured by individuals answering questions about themselves. One of the main criticisms levelled at self-report questionnaires is that they are particularly susceptible to faking and social desirability, especially in highstakes situations such as recruitment. One of the sessions will attempt to address this criticism by sharing their work on creating a task-based method for assessing The Big Five personality constructs, the other session will argue that personality changes over time, with work being a significant factor in shaping that adaptive change.
The first session will be presented by TK Wu - Business Psychologist, MOSAIC Tasks and Alan Howard – Director, MOSAIC Tasks
Image Tk Wu presenting in Hong Kong
Following on from the success of their papers presented at the most recent ABP and BPS DOP conferences, TK and Alan will be presenting 'An Alternative to Personality Questionnaires'.
Utilising recent advances in technology, personality assessment can be revolutionised so that one no longer needs to rely solely on questionnaires, which routinely suffer from distortion such as social desirability responding (Birkeland et al 2006). The alternative approach – Objective Personality Tasks or OPTs – builds on the research of Cattell (e.g. Cattell and Warburton 1967). OPTs rely on measuring task performance – but it is the way people complete each task, rather than how well they do on it, that reveals their personality traits. Participants are unaware of which aspects of their personality are being assessed. The tasks are typically short e.g. 5-12 minutes, completed online and resemble puzzles or challenges that are applicable to all ages and levels of seniority.
TK and Alan will present the results of MOSAIC’s ongoing research into the validation of multiple OPT’s in a sample of 200 participants using self-report ratings of personality and biodata.
