F
or years, it has been popular to bemoan the
sorry state of psychological testing. Supposedly,“no one”uses such tests any longer. Many aca-
demics argue that testing in general—and projective
testing in particular—is not valid. Except perhaps
for the MMPI-2, they say, objective tests are also
out of style. Others advise that textbooks such as
this one should drastically reduce the coverage of
personality assessment. There is only one thing
wrong with the foregoing claims and advice:
They do not reflect the real world of clinical prac-
tice. In fact, psychological assessment continues to
be a high-profile activity of both today’s practicing
clinicians and clinical researchers (Butcher, 2010).
Results from surveys of clinicians reinforce the con-
clusion that projective tests, the Wechsler scales,
and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory-2 continue to be highly popular and
that many clinicians do depend on psychological
tests (Camara, Nathan, & Puente, 2000;Watkins,
Campbell, Nieberding, & Hallmark, 1995). As we
shall see later in this book, testing in such specialty
areas as forensic psychology, neuropsychological
assessment, and health psychology actually seems
to be on the upswing. Even in the case of projec-
tive testing (the favorite“whipping boy”of many
who claim that testing is a dying field), the usage
trends remain fairly strong.
Perhaps, then, the reports of the demise of per-sonality assessment are a bit exaggerated (Exner,
1995). Table 8-1 gives an idea of the kinds of
tests in use today and the frequency of their use.
This table presents a rank-ordering of the top 20
assessment procedures used by a randomly selected
sample of clinical psychologists in terms of percent-
age who use the test in a 1995 survey (Watkins
et al., 1995) and in a 2000 survey (Camara, Nathan,
& Punte, 2000). As can be seen, across both surveys,
intelligence tests and the MMPI-2 are used fre-
quently, but so are several projective tests.
However, there are other important considera-
tions besides frequency of usage. Personality assess-
ment measures must show high levels of reliability
and validity to be useful to clinical psychologists.
Furthermore, in addition to good psychometric
properties, tests should be selected and used based
on research findings and viable theories about psy-
chological problems, as well as a test’s clinical utility
and contribution with other sources of information
to produce good outcomes (Hunsley & Mash,
2007). A long history of relatively uncritical use of
certain personality measures does not justify their use
today. Therefore, in this chapter, we not only
describe some of the more popular objective and
projective personality measures but we critically eval-
uate their psychometric properties and clinical utility
as well. Another related issue concerns accountability
(Wood, Garb, Lilienfeld, & Nezworski, 2002).
In this age of managed care and increased public
scrutiny of the profession, our assessments must
be shown to be clinically useful, cost-effective, scien-
tifically sound, and fair and unbiased (Whipple &
Lambert, 2011).Objective Tests
We begin our survey of personality assessment with
an examination of objective tests.Objective personal-
ity measuresinvolve the administration of a standard
set of questions or statements to which the exam-
inee responds using a fixed set of options. Many
objective tests use a true/false or yes/no response
format; others provide a dimensional scale (e.g.,
0 strongly disagree; 1 disagree; 2 neutral;
3 agree; 4 = strongly agree). Objective tests have
both advantages and disadvantages.Advantages
Objective tests of personality or self-report inven-
tories have had a central role in the development of
clinical psychology (Butcher, 2010). The historicalPERSONALITY ASSESSMENT 219