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Multiple-discipline theoretical foundation - integral personality interpretation
All existing psychological tests including those of them that claim to embrace a wide range of personal features rest upon one particular basic theory. This constrains the diversity of the tasks in question.
Personality Interpreter test overtakes almost all acknowledged psychological theories and a number of exclusive authorial concepts, such as system psychodynamics.
Classical psychoanalysis and transactional analysis applied here help to educe unconscious grounds for life scenarios and attitudes formed in early childhood.
The ideas of rational, humanistic and social psychology reflect person's supraliminal appraisals concerning the person him or herself and his or her social role.
Communicative psychology and theory of conflicts included in its theoretical background help to define person's interaction with his or her surroundings.
Cognitive psychology enables to draw conclusions on the matter of person's modes of thought, strategies of decision-making and features of intelligence.
Patterns of neuro-linguistic programming reflect inner projections of the outworld and person's responsiveness to various stimuli.
Gestalt psychology and psychophysiological methods offer an opportunity to evaluate person's physical condition at the stage.
Dynamical and conative conceptions introduced in the method empower to discover potentialities, to foresee the prospective and determine effective techniques of influence and motivation.
However, the main point of the test is the use of systematic approach that allows us to synthesize the integral view of one's personality with a help of numerous scales and evaluations. This description would not reduce itself to the quantitative estimations of personal features but rather would discover the priorities and their interconnections.
System psychodynamics - authorial conception
One of the main theoretical concepts involved in the Personality Interpreter development is the concept of system psychodynamics. System psychodynamics is an original author's theory that conjoins practical results of motivation techniques with the structuredness and comprehensiveness of differential approach.
System psychodynamics sets up actual problems and suggests the most effective ways of their solution leaving aside the case investigation. It takes into account the motives of an individual or entire social group and enables to predict people's behavior. It helps to find the best forms of self-actualization, to choose effective ways of administration and manipulation and to put up your own anti-manipulation defense.
Longstanding experience has shown that system psychodynamics proves to be effective in the solving of a wide variety of problems, such as:
marketing, trade missions, agent's job
work with clients, customer services
personal image-building
forming up interpersonal, family and intimate relations
psychosomatic correction
selection of the field of activity and life-style
recruiting management, team-making and administration
advertising and PR-campaign development
Psychologists were concerned about the hierarchy of motives more than a century ago. Maslow arranged human needs in comfort, protection, appraisal, self-esteem, self-actualization and others in the famous motivation pyramid. Natural needs were placed in the pyramid foundation, while the highest spiritual values were at the top.
According to the ideas of Maslow, human personality step by step goes up the pyramid in the process of development. The highest step reached by the person determines his or her motivational priority.
Experience has shown that Maslow's model of human psychology was wrong, as every individual has his or her own "pyramid" to determine the priorities. But the connection between motives and the most vital needs stated by Maslow was used as a background for the system psychodynamics theory.
Modern system methods and means of statistics enabled us to arrange the whole variety of motives and needs into four distinct groups. Below you can see their relation with the range of external features and behavioral stereotypes:
Hedonistic motives correspond to the demand for comfort, physical pleasure and short-distance communication
Aggressive motives correspond to the demand for superiority, status and feeling of power, influence and leadership
Homeostatic motives correspond to the demand for stability, reliability, equability and structuredness
Narcissistic motives correspond to the demand for public recognition and self-appraisal, consideration and feeling of personal distinctness.
This delimitation enabled us to determine four basic scales of the test, which reflect the priority of each group of demands and intensity of the corresponding motivations. The value of each scale can be estimated separately.
System psychodynamics designates four basic and four derivative scales of the Personality Interpreter test and gives us 16 discrete types formed by the combination of the main scales’ values. Analogous and discrete approaches combined make it possible to create an integral view on a personality without the loss of flexibility and detail.
Direct verification of validity – the highest veracity
Psychological tests validity check is usually carried out by comparing their results with the existing acknowledged methods. Such a way of verification results in their exactness being admittedly lower than one of the tests used as a model of evaluation.
Validity estimation of Personality Interpreter scales and explanations was carried out by personal interaction with people under the test and their surroundings. They were followed up by professional psychologists and psychotherapists, their life and activity durably observed. Each even the slightest mismatch of the test results with a real situation gave rise to new corrections introduced to the program.
Therefore, the test we finally got as a result of longstanding practice exceeds all existing methods in the measures of validity.
Extensive statistics – objective results
Statistical sampling used in the process of Personality Interpreter development was about 280.000 people. This is four times more than the statistical sampling of MMPI, which so far was considered the biggest one.
As a general rule, data used in the process of psychological test development is collected among a specific group of people united by one task in common. Statistical objectiveness of Personality Interpreter test is gained not only due to the huge volume of sampling but also due to its diversity.
The basis of statistical sampling for Personality Interpreter was formed by the customers of practicing psychologists and members of psychotherapeutic groups, candidates for various positions, employees and customers of network marketing and marriage agencies, visitors of international dating, psychological and entertainment sites and numerous come-and-go people who responded to the newspaper advertisement.
Such a way of statistical sampling enabled us to avoid system distortions determined by the uniformity of the population involved in the check studies and similarity of the tasks they had in mind while answering the test. We succeeded in obtaining an actually representative sampling.
Unique methods – no way to distort the answer
The majority of tests employ the sum of values for a particular group of questions in the process of estimating the result for a corresponding scale. According to the developers’ subjective opinion, these questions are supposed to correlate with the feature in question. Generally these correlations are obvious and the testee can easily fit the answers to get the desired result.
Personality Interpreter test has another type of correlations between the questions grouped together. These correlations were educed according to the results of statistical sampling. Groups that have corresponding quotients include not only direct, reverse and projective questions but also all other questions associated with the group obliquely. These connections cannot be obviously seen, but they are taken into account in the process of estimation. If the testee consciously wants to make a particular result higher or lower he or she will have to correct the answers for all other questions of the test in respect of 10.000 intersections. Otherwise, the program will correct the result by itself. This is the way the program responds to random mistakes stipulated by misunderstanding or false application.
Besides the summation of the values for the groups with corresponding quotients, Personality Interpreter analyzes the quantitative relation of various estimations in the limits of the rating scale. This is the way we get estimated tendency to agree, tendency to object and categoricalness. These parameters are not only important features of person under the test’s personality able to reflect his or her present day mental and physical condition. They enable us to introduce some changes in the answers we have.
When the program is used in the interactive mode we estimate the time taken to answer a particular question. By doing this we are able to estimate the significance and complexity of the question for the testee as well as his or her attitude to the test and one’s motivations.
Data derived in the process are integrated and normalized in reference to the statistical matrices with use of a unique mathematical apparatus. This enables us to exclude the influence of conscious or unconscious corruption of the answers and accidental mistakes.
Flexible structure – ability to introduce prompt adjustments
The majority of computer programs that implement psychological tests are rigid structures. All statistical quotients and textual interpretations are included in the algorithm. Such a construction supposes that any change in the statistics or in questions and interpretations will require a far-reaching alteration of the whole system, which will take much time, to say nothing of any attempts to change or extend functionality capabilities of the program.
Personality Interpreter test has modularized structure, while all the textual interpretations and statistical matrices are taken into external files. This enables us to alter questions of the questionnaire, create new templates for the reports and replenish the statistics without changing the basic algorithm. Therefore, Personality Interpreter test is a methodology developing all the time and following all the alterations in the people’s mentality and demands of the market.
By virtue of its flexible structure Personality Interpreter can be used for setting up new computer applications meant for some specific users and some specific issues. So far there has been created a program for estimation couple’s compatibility and finding the most compatible partners in the database. Also there is a program to evaluate one’s business features designed for head officers and recruiting services.
Mathematical apparatus – high fidelity of the results
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Specifically organized scales and questions – subjective answers result in objective information output
The majority of tests applying to questionnaires address their questions to the testee directly. The person under the test is suggested to tell about him or herself frankly and straight. Some tests comprise check questions that are used to estimate the quotient of falseness and believability. Such a process resembles an inquisition with the testee warned about criminal liability for false testimony. However, even if the person has no reasons to wrench the test results, a human being cannot appraise him or herself in an unbiased manner.
Personality Interpreter test provides the testee with an opportunity to take stand of a casual observer. The testee is to evaluate veracity of a particular statement according to his or her own opinion, which will be admittedly subjective. This approach enables us to exclude the factor of situational anxiety and to decrease the influence of various motives to distort the result. “False” answers would not prevent Personality Interpreter from giving a valid estimation, since they are the data that help to produce it. It is not information that gets evaluated with every answer but a testee’ choice to answer the question in a particular way.
In the process of test development there are some initial basic scales meant to be estimated by the test. Then we have some questions that, according to the author’s subjective opinion, correlate with the abovementioned scales. Thus, most of the tests will not evaluate the testee, but will rather characterize the author him or herself.
There were no initial scales in the process of development of Personality Interpreter test. First, there was a questionnaire that covered various spheres of life. The answers were collected and processes by interval correlative analysis. By doing this we got several groups of questions with high rate of interval correlation. The groups were compared with features used in various branches of psychology. Some of the scales introduced were discovered and defined for the first time.
Most test developers aim to increase test’s trustability as high as possible. Quite opposite to the validity, this term would not describe veracity of the test. It would point at stability and frequency of the results. Trying to lower up-to-the-minute state of the testee influencing the test, developers make the program insensitive to its alterations.
Modern techniques of dispersive analysis used for Personality Interpreter test empower us to distinguish stable components of the scales from those that are subjective to change. Personality Interpreter algorithm by no means ignores mental condition of the person under the test, but rather identifies it among the other stable features. This makes it possible to estimate basic features initially peculiar for a human being and to monitor the dynamics of personality development. In such a way, we are able to see the alterations brought by education, training or psychological correction.
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