Personality
Psych in Real Life: Blirtatiousness, Questionnaires, and Validity
Learning Objectives
- Describe the complications of developing personality assessments, including the importance of reliability and validity
Creating a Personality Questionnaire
Psychologists often assess a person’s personality using a questionnaire that is filled in by the person who is being assessed. Such a tests is called a “self-report inventory.” To get into the spirit of personality assessment, please complete the personality inventory below. It has only 10 questions.
Take the TIPI Personality Test
The questionnaire you just completed is called the TIPI: The Ten-Item Personality Inventory. It was created by University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling as a very brief measure of five personality characteristics: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. These five personality dimensions are called “The Big Five” and, taken together, they have been found to be an excellent first-level summary of people’s personality.
Tests of the Big Five personality dimensions are widely used by researchers and by people in business and education who want a general view of a person’s personality. There are several different self-report inventories that have been developed to measure the Big Five traits, most with 50 or more questions. The TIPI, which you just took, was developed for situations where time is very limited and the tester (usually a researcher) needs a “good enough” version of the test. One of the longer versions would be used by someone needing a more reliable and nuanced view of someone’s personality.
Looking at the TIPI, you might have the impression that creating a personality inventory is pretty easy. You come up with a few obvious questions, find names that fit, and you’re ready to claim you are measuring something about people’s personality.
Undoubtedly you can find some “personality tests” on the internet that fit this description, but tests created by serious psychologists for use in research or in clinical settings must go through a much more careful development process before they are widely accepted and used. And, even then, the tests continue to be studied, criticized, and revised.
In this exercise, we will look more closely at some of the work that goes into creating a personality inventory or questionnaire. To help you keep your eyes on the process of test construction, we want you to think about a personality dimension that is not as obvious as self-esteem or extraversion. We are going to assess blirtatiousness.
Part 1: Creating the Blirt Scale
One of my closest friends is sometimes annoying and usually entertaining, but he never holds back; you always know what he’s thinking. His wife is kind and friendly, and she is first to arrive when help is needed, but she hides her feelings and opinions. It is not easy to know what she wants or where she stands.
Consider your own closest friends. Where do t