Identifying Personality Characteristics and Psychopathology 283Petoskey, & Rowe, 2000; Stinnett, Havey, & Oehler-Stinnett,
1994; Wilson & Reschly, 1996), and forensic psycholo-
gists doing criminal evaluations (Borum & Grisso, 1995),
personal injury evaluations (Boccaccini & Brodsky, 1999),
and custody evaluations (Ackerman & Ackerman, 1997;
LaFortune & Carpenter, 1998). Surveys have recently been
undertaken outside of the United States as well, as illustrated
in a report by Muñiz, Prieto, Almeida, and Bartram (1999) on
test use in Spain, Portugal, and Latin American countries.
Without always repeating these reference citations, subse-
quent comments in this chapter about test use frequency are
based on the findings they report.
IDENTIFYING PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS
AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Standardized assessment of personality characteristics and
psychopathology emerged from four separate threads of his-
tory differentiated by their distinctive procedures. A first
thread involves relatively structured procedures in which
respondents reply to a fixed number of specific questions by
selecting their answer from a prescribed list of alternatives
(e.g., Question: “Do you feel unhappy?” Answers: “Most of
the time,” “Occasionally,” “Hardly ever”). Such relatively
structured measures are commonly referred to as self-report
methods, given that the data they provide constitute what
people are able and willing to say about themselves.
A second thread consists of relatively unstructured proce-
dures in which respondents are presented with somewhat
ambiguous test stimuli and given rather vague instructions
concerning what they should say about or do with these stim-
uli (e.g., shown a picture of a boy looking at a violin, the
respondent is asked to make up a story that has a beginning
and an end and includes how the boy is feeling and what he is
thinking about). Measures of this kind have traditionally been
called “projective” tests, because they invite respondents to
attribute characteristics to test stimuli that are based on their
own impressions rather than known fact (e.g., “The boy is
feeling sad”) or give them considerable latitude to complete
tasks in whatever manner they prefer (asked by respondents
about how they should proceed on these measures, examiners
typically answer with statements like “It’s up to you” or “Any
way you like”).
However, most so-called projective tests have some
clearly defined as well as ambiguous aspects and include spe-
cific as well as vague instructions (a violin isa violin, and
“What will happen to him?” is a precise request for informa-
tion). Accordingly, instead of being labeled “projective”
measures, these relatively unstructured assessment instru-
ments are probably more appropriately classified as belong-
ing to a category of “performance-based” measures, as has
been proposed by the American Psychological Association
Work Group on Psychological Assessment (Kubiszyn et al.,
2000; Meyer et al., 2001). By contrast with self-report data,
the data obtained by performance-based measures consist not
of what people say about themselves, but of the manner in
which they deal with various tasks they are given to do.
A third thread in the history of methods for assessing per-
sonality characteristics and psychopathology comprises in-
terview procedures. Assessment interviews are similar to
self-report measures, in that respondents are asked directly
what the assessor wants to know. Unlike relatively structured
tests, however, which are typically taken in written form and
involve little interaction with the examiner, interviews are in-
teractive oral procedures in which the participants engage in
a conversational exchange. Moreover, assessment interviews
include a performance-based as well as a self-report compo-
nent, in that interviewers typically base their impressions not
only on what respondents say about themselves, but also on
how they say it and how they conduct themselves while being
interviewed.
The fourth thread consists of behavioral procedures that
epitomize performance-based assessment. In behavioral as-
sessment, the manner in which respondents conduct them-
selves is not an ancillary source of information, but instead
constitutes the core data being obtained. Respondents are
asked to perform tasks selected or designed to mimic certain
real-world situations as closely as possible, and their perfor-
mance on these tasks is taken as a representative sample of
behavior that should be predictive of how they will act in the
real-world situation. Gideon’s previously mentioned method
of selecting his troops exemplifies assessment based on ob-
serving behavior in representative circumstances. As elabo-
rated next, behavioral assessment, like the other three threads
of personality assessment history, has a unique lineage with
respect to how, why, and by whom it became established.Relatively Structured TestsThe entry of the United States into World War I influenced as-
sessment psychology by creating an urgent need to evaluate
not only the intellectual level of draftees, as noted earlier, but
their emotional stability as well. Reports from France in 1917
indicated that the war effort was being hampered by the pres-
ence in the ranks of mentally fragile soldiers who could not
tolerate the psychological stress of combat. In response to
these reports, Robert Woodworth (1869–1962), a prominent
experimental psychologist who had done his doctoral work
with Cattell and later succeeded him as department head at