Introduction
Psychologists have made attempts to modernize personality measurement. A more modern approach is referred to as the psychodynamic approach. This approach makes use of projective tests to measure the individual’s personality. Modern personality measurement tries to expose the individual’s unconscious desires.
Main body
Human behavior is driven by unconscious processes. To access the unconscious the psychologists use indirect methods. (Personality100.com 2003). Personality measures are carried out to determine the number of vital characteristics and behaviors. How people interact with others, what motivates them and what they value most may also be determined by personality. Personality measures in humans are mainly cited extensively, vastly regarded, and are original assessments of ordinary range personality. Personality measures have a wide range of use with normal and clinical populations. Personality measures are used in career planning, marital counseling, leadership advancement, and selection of employment (Sigma Assessment systems, 2005). Some of the other personality measurements are; self-esteem, subjective well-being, social anxiety, depression, shyness, loneliness, trust, values, sex roles, and depression.
Attitude in psychology is simply a theoretical creation that represents an individual’s extent of like or dislike for an item; this is according to John F. Jones (n. d). In attitude measurement, an assessment is made on how attitude might affect the behavior of a person. For instance, you can assess how things like time, social pressure can change or affect a person. There are vast ways of measuring attitude but self-report versions are more often preferred. Some of these popular self-report versions include the Likert Scales, Semantic differential scales, and projective scales. (Social and Cognitive Psychology n.d). The Likert scale is where a statement about something is made and then a series of numbers in which people can choose to demonstrate the extent to which they agree with something. A semantic Differential scale is where a distinct attitude may include diverse meanings or qualities of evaluation. Projective techniques on the other hand have been developed from the psychoanalytic convention of research and therapy. Projective techniques can be used to measure the affective concealed part of attitude. Such factors as aggression, hostility, and sexual desires are measured using this technique. There is a vast relationship between behavior attitude. Attitude is an emotion with a behavioral component. Attitude has both belief and affective components. Attitude and behavior should always be consistent. (Relationship of Attitudes to Behavior: Theory and Research). As compared to personality measurement attitude measurement has always been a problem. It is always a problem to measure the prediction of intentions. Apart from the researcher’s intuition, there is no way behavior or attitude can be scaled or measured. You cannot measure how positive or negative particular behavior or attitude might be. Another limitation of the attitude test is that its reliability is suspect. It is not always that consistency in scores will be achieved or achieved.
Just like the other two measures the psychological measure of interest is considered to be relatively stable. Therefore, it is used by psychologists to make predictions of future behavior. In the measurement of interest, it is assumed that all the psychological attributes are normally distributed. All psychological differences do reveal differences in individuals. It is very important that when making predictions in behavior correct attributes should be matched with the predicted behavior.
References
- Personality 100.com 2003 Describe how Psychologists have attempted to measure personality. Web.
- Sigma Assessment systems 2005 Personality Measures.
- Social and Cognitive Psychology (n.d) retrieved 11th 2008 from Likert scale.
- John F. Jones (n d) A Theory of Attitude Formation and Change and its Application to Social Group work.
- Relationship of Attitudes to Behavior: Theory and Research (n d) Web.