1 Word Count = 8,206 Methods of Personality Assessment

This chapter cannot provide an exhaustive review of the many approaches to personality assessment that are in common use today because of the vast size of the area. With entire books devoted to individual instruments, a brief chapter such as this is necessarily limited in its scope. In particular, the chapter will not address methods of projective personality assessment. Those interested in an introduction to such methods may consult the relevant chapters in books by Groth-Marnat (2003), and Weiner (1997), as well as the commentaries in the Journal of Personality Assessment relating to the use of projective instruments such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test. For a critical perspective, readers may consult, for example, Hunsley, Lee, and Wood (2003). In the present chapter, the approach being taken focuses on contrasting the multidimensional personality assessment instruments constructed using factor analysis 2 by Raymond B. Cattell and his colleagues with those multidimensional scales developed using other approaches for assessing personality attributes, notably the construct-oriented methods advocated by Douglas Jackson. While other measurement approache