My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Personality assessment is perhaps more of an art form than a science.
In an attempt to render it as objective and standardized as possible, generations of clinicians came up with psychological tests and structured interviews. These are administered under similar conditions and use identical stimuli to elicit information from respondents.
This way, any disparity in the responses of the subjects can and is attributed to the idiosyncrasies of their personalities and not to any flaws in the tests themselves.
Most tests restrict the repertory of permitted answers.
Consider, for instance, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the MMBI-2. The true or false are the only allowed reactions to questions in the MMBI. Scoring and keying the results is also an automated process wherein all true responses get one or more points on one or more scales. All false responses get no points at all.
So these processes are automated and this limits the involvement of the diagnostician to the interpretation of the test results, the scale scores.
Admittedly, interpretation is arguably more important than data gathering. Summing it up, inevitably biased human input cannot and is not avoided in the process of personality assessment and evaluation, but its pernicious effects are somewhat reigned in by the systematic and impartial nature of the underlying instruments, the psychological tests.
Still, rather than rely on one questionnaire and its interpretation, most practitioners administer to the same subject a battery of tests and structured interviews. These often vary in important aspects, their response formats, the stimuli involved, the procedures of administration and the scoring methodology.
Moreover, in order to establish a test’s reliability, many diagnosticians administer it repeatedly over time to the same client. If the interpreted results are more or less the same, the test is said to be reliable.
The outcomes of various tests must fit in with each other. Put together, they must provide a consistent and coherent picture.
If one test yields readings that are constantly at odds with the conclusions of other questionnaires or interviews, this test may not be valid.
In other words, it may not be measuring what it claims to be measuring.
Thus, a test quantifying one’s grandiosity must conform to the scores of tests which measure a reluctance to admit failings or propensity to present a socially desirable and inflated facade. These elements must fit together, grandiosity, reluctance to admit failings, and an inflated self-image for self.
If a grandiosity test is positively related to irrelevant, conceptually independent traits, such as intelligence or depression, it doesn’t render it valid. There’s something wrong with it.
Most tests are either objective or projective.
The psychologist George Kelly offered this tongue-in-cheek definition of both in an article in 1958 titled Men’s Construction of His Alternatives. It’s included in his book The Assessment of Human Motives.
He says, when the subject is asked to guess what the examiner is thinking, we call it an objective test. When the examiner tries to guess what the subject is thinking, we call it a projective device.
The scoring of objective tests is computerized, no human input is involved.
Examples of such standardized instruments include the MMPI-2, the California Psychological Inventory, the CPI, and the Mellon Clinical Multi-Actual Inventory in its second edition by now.
Of course, a human finally leans the meaning of the data gathered by these questionnaires. Interpretation ultimately depends on the knowledge, training, experience, skills, and natural gifts of the therapist or diagnostician who administered the test.
Projective tests are far less structured and thus a lot more ambiguous.
As L. K. Frank observed in a 1939 article titled Projective Methods for the Study of Personality, the patient’s responses to such tests are projections of his way of seeing life. His meanings, significances, patterns, especially his feelings.
In projective tests, the responses are not constrained. The scoring is done exclusively by humans and involves judgment and thus, of course, bias.
Clinicians rarely agree on the same interpretation and often use competing methods of scoring, yielding disparate results.
The diagnostician’s personality comes into prominent play in projective tests. The best known of these so-called tests is the Rorschach set of inputs.
In the following series of videos, we will discuss eight very important psychological tests and structured interviews.
Stay with us and keep watching.
