Assessment of Personality

• Personality is defined as distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. These can differ from each other in meaningful ways, in which people also seem to show some consistency in behavior.
• Personality assessment may be defined as the measurement and evaluation of psychological traits, states, values, interests, attitudes, worldview, acculturation, personal identity, sense of humor, cognitive and behavioral styles, and/or related individual characteristics.
• Personality type as a constellation of traits and states that is similar in pattern to one identified category of personality within a taxonomy of personalities.
• Locus (meaning “place” or “site”) of control is a person’s perception about the source of things that happen to him or her.
• In general, people who see themselves as largely responsible for what happens to them are said to have an internal locus of control.
• People who are prone to attribute what happens to them to external factors (such as fate or the actions of others) are said to have an external locus of control.
• Nomothetic Approach is characterized by efforts to learn how a limited number of personality traits can be applied to all people.
• Idiographic approach is characterized by efforts to learn about each individual’s unique constellation of personality traits, with no attempt to characterize each person according to any particular set of traits.
• a criterion group is a reference group of testtakers who share specific characteristics and whose responses to test items serve as a standard according to which items will be included in or discarded from the final version of a scale.