Journal: The Role of Personality and Values in Human Services Practice

Your personality is a constellation of traits that influence how you think, feel, and behave. For this Journal Assignment, you complete a personality assessment based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. The assessment will provide your scores on four different dichotomies (Kaler, 2007, pp. 676–677):

• Extroversion/introversion: Degree to which you focus on and draw energy from the external world (e.g., people and things) or the internal world (e.g., ideas and concepts).
• Sensing/intuition: Degree to which you focus on concrete information gained from the five senses or abstract information gained from perception.
• Thinking/feeling: Degree to which you base your decisions on rationality and objectivity or values and maintaining harmony.
• Judging/perceiving: Degree to which you prefer resolution or open-ended situations.

You then use the results of the assessment to draw conclusions about which of your personality traits would be particularly useful in a given human services role and which could pose some challenges. You also compare your values to the values associated with the practice of human services.

Reference:
Kaler, M. E. (2007). Myers-Briggs type indicator. In N. J. Salkind (Ed.) Encyclopedia of measurement and statistics (pp. 676–677). SAGE.

To Prepare

• Review your Course Announcements for possible information related to this week’s Assignment.
• Complete the personality assessment, located in this week’s Learning Resources, and review your results.
• Given what you have learned about various advanced human services professional practitioner roles in previous weeks, identify which of your personality traits might be particularly useful for a given role and which might pose some challenges for a given role.
• Review the Learning Resources on human services values. Compare your values with human services values, identify instances where your values conflict with human services values, and consider how you would resolve the conflict.

Submit a 2- to 3-page journal entry that addresses the following:

• Given that advanced human services professional practitioners often work in leadership roles, describe one of your personality traits that would be particularly useful in a leadership role and one that might pose some challenges in a leadership role and explain why. Then, explain what steps you would take to address the challenges. Be specific.
• Consider the other roles addressed in this course (i.e., planner, humanitarian, outreach worker, advanced case manager, and advocate). Describe one of your personality traits that would be particularly useful in one of those roles and one that might pose some challenges in one of those roles and explain why. Then, explain what steps you would take to address the challenges. Be specific.
• Compare your personal values to the values associated with the practice of human services. Are there instances where your personal values conflict with the human services values? If so, how might you resolve the conflict?