Selecting Personnel Imagine that you are a personnel psychologist, charged with the responsibility of selecting personnel for a mission to Pluto. Your employer, National Aeronautics and Spa

Observation & Interviews.html

Observation & Interviews

In addition to the types of projective personality assessments described previously, observations of individuals can also be used to inform how one's personality is understood.

The development of personality is affected by many intertwining factors, and observing the ways in which one interacts with the world is a useful tool to improve understanding. This can be done by observation of the individual in a natural setting while she/he is alone, or by viewing the social interactions and possible influences on personality in this realm. This type of assessment is especially useful with young children or individuals with pathological symptomology.

Interviews and narrative analyses are becoming an increasingly popular tool in the uncovering of personality traits. Historically, the process of interviewing was concerned with five dimensions:

• Content vs. process
• Goal orientation vs. expressive elements
• Degree of directedness
• Amount of structure
• Relative amount of activity expressed by participants

Although these core dimensions have been conceptualized differently and altered slightly over time, they are still used to analyze narrative analyses by many clinicians, psychologists, and researchers.

A major benefit of using interviews is flexibility—participants have the opportunity to express themselves in any way desired. Responses, however, should be considered in context with the cultural background from which the individual comes.

Projective Testing.html

Projective Testing

As opposed to other types of psychological tests, projective personality assessments require the test-taker to respond in slightly more abstract ways.

In projective assessments, the goal is to interpret responses given to ambiguous stimuli in order to better understand an individual's unconscious mind. Drawings or other expressive stimuli are presented to the individual and the responses are thought to be projections of specific aspects of one's personality. The ways in which one organizes feelings, memories, experiences, and thoughts make up personality, and the explanations of projective drawings reveal an individual's internal dynamics and beliefs.

Depending on the type of information being sought, different types of projective assessments will be useful in different situations. One of the first projective drawing techniques was developed in the first half of the 20th century and attempted to use aspects of a creative production to measure children's cognitive abilities. Since this early test measuring development, several other projective assessments have been developed using this model.

One of the most well-known tests is known as House-Tree-Person. This assessment asks individuals to create a drawing using a person, a house, and a tree, and based on the layout, sizing, details, etc. of these three objects, information regarding relational patterns and beliefs about the world is gleamed.

The most common projective assessment used in present day, is the Draw-A-Person technique. The quantitative scoring system that has been developed for this assessment is thought to reveal information about the relationship between an individual's external environment and the drawing that was created. The complexity and richness of the drawings are the biggest factors believed to be contributing to, and revealing of, the individual's personality.