Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

D I V E R S I T Y
Should Race and Ethnicity 
Be Used to Establish Norms?
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 Module 
42 
Assessing Personality: Determining What Makes Us Distinctive 
463
The issue of establishing norms for tests is further complicated by the existence of a 
wide array of personality measures and approaches to assessment. We next consider 
some of these measures.
Self-Report Measures 
of Personality 
If someone wanted to assess your personality, one possible approach would be to 
carry out an extensive interview with you to determine the most important events 
in your childhood, your social relationships, and your successes and failures. Obvi-
ously, though, such a technique would take extraordinary time and effort. 
It is also unnecessary. Just as physicians draw only a small sample of your blood 
to test it, psychologists can utilize
self-report measures
that ask people about a 
relatively small sample of their behavior. This sampling of self-report data is then 
used to infer the presence of particular personality characteristics. For example, a 
researcher who was interested in assessing a person’s orientation to life might admin-
ister the questionnaire shown in Figure 1. Although the questionnaire consists of only 
a few questions, the answers can be used to generalize about personality character-
istics. (Try it yourself!) 
One of the best examples of a self-report measure, and one of the most frequently 
used personality tests, is the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 
(MMPI-2).
Although the original purpose of this measure was to identify people with 
specifi c sorts of psychological diffi culties, it has been found to predict a variety of 
FIGURE 1 
The Life Orientation Test–
Revised. Complete this test by indicating 
the degree to which you agree with 
each of the 10 statements using the 
scale from 0 to 4 for each item. Try to be 
as accurate as possible. There are no 
right or wrong answers. 
(Source: Adapted 
from Table 6 (p. 1073) from Scheier, M. F., 
Carver, C. S., & Bridges, M. W. (1994). 
Distinguishing optimism from neuroticism 
(and trait anxiety, self-mastery, and self-
esteem): A reevaluation of the Life Orienta -
tion Test. 
Journal of Personality and Social 
Psychology, 67,
1063–1078. Copyright © 1994 
by The American Psychological Association. 
Adapted with permission.