Personality testing

Over the past several decades, the social behavior and personality of people has been critical issue around the world.
It is felt that personality traits may have a direct bearing on adoption.
In connection with many sociological research problems it is of increasing importance to obtain data concerning certain somewhat elusive personal characteristics. Foremost among the needed data aremeasurements of attitudes, values, and personality.

PERSONALITY TESTING the systematic use of tests to quantify psychophysical behavior, abilities, and problems and to make predictions about psychological performance.

In personality testing, judgments of test content tend to be especially untrustworthy, and dependable external criteria are rare. One may, for example, assume that a man whoperspires excessively feels anxious. Yet his feelings of anxiety, if any, are not directly observable. Any assumed trait (anxiety, for example) that is held to underlie observable behaviour is called a construct. Since the construct itself is not directly measurable, the adequacy of any test as a measure of anxiety can be gauged only indirectly; e.g., through evidence for its construct validity.
Atest exhibits construct validity when low scorers and high scorers are found to respond differently to everyday experiences or to experimental procedures. A test presumed to measure anxiety, for example, would give evidence of construct validity if those with high scores (“high anxiety”) can be shown to learn less efficiently than do those with lower scores. The rationale is that there are severalpropositions associated with the concept of anxiety: anxious people are likely to learn less efficiently, especially if uncertain about their capacity to learn; they are likely to overlook things they should attend to in carrying out a task; they are apt to be under strain and hence feel fatigued. (But anxious people may be young or old, intelligent or unintelligent.) If people with high scoreson a test of anxiety show such proposed signs of anxiety, that is, if a test of anxiety has the expected relationships with other measurements as given in these propositions, the test is viewed as having construct validity.
Test reliability is affected by scoring accuracy, adequacy of content sampling, and the stability of the trait being measured. Scorer reliability refers to the consistencywith which different people who score the same test agree. For a test with a definite answer key, scorer reliability is of negligible concern. When the subject responds with his own words, handwriting, and organization of subject matter, however, the preconceptions of different raters produce different scores for the same test from one rater to another; that is, the test shows scorer (or rater)unreliability. In the absence of an objective scoring key, a scorer's evaluation may differ from one time to another and from those of equally respected evaluators. Other things being equal, tests that permit objective scoring are preferred.
Reliability also depends on the representativeness with which tests sample the content to be tested. If scores on items of a test that sample a particularuniverse of content designed to be reasonably homogeneous (e.g., vocabulary) correlate highly with those on another set of items selected from the same universe of content, the test has high content reliability. But if the universe of content is highly diverse in that it samples different factors (say, verbal reasoning and facility with numbers), the test may have high content reliability but lowinternal consistency.
For most purposes, the performance of a subject on the same test from day to day should be consistent. When such scores do tend to remain stable over time, the test exhibits temporal reliability. Fluctuations of scores may arise from instability of a trait; for example, the test taker may be happier one day than the next. Or temporal unreliability may reflect injudicious test...