Subjectivity Everywhere
My first experience with personality testing is when I took Psyc332 in McGill. I was excited with the knowledge I got from this course, especially how researchers gather information about this construct. But as I got more experience and more knowledge about how constructs are tested, as well as what is reasonable and what is not reasonable regarding testing, I would like to critique some of the subjectivity that are prevalent in testing for personality.
To summarize what I have learned so far regarding personality testing: researchers could reach a final decision about a person’s personality by satisfying 3 levels of analysis. First, information has to be gathered regarding the big 5 personality traits (which are extraversion, neuroticism, openness to new experience, consciousness, and agreeableness). Second, identifying the personal concerns of the person. Personal concerns consist of information regarding motives, intimacy status, attachment style, and information regarding autonomy. Third, getting a life narrative from the individual. This level asks the individual to give an autobiographical narrative of his/her life, which is then quantified and averaged with the information from the 2 previous levels to give a full picture of the personality.
Since the big 5 personality traits, and the components of personal concerns are all obtained by objective ways (i.e. by factor analysis), I can understand how valid and reliable the data that can be obtained from them. But, I guess my critique is mainly concerned with the life narrative level of the analysis because, it is the most subjective of the levels. First of all, how would the narrative be quantified, and by who? I would think that the norm in quantifying narratives is through review by multiple blind graders who, each, gives his/her own opinion about the narrative, and what it implies about the personality of the narrator. But, this is exactly the problem. Each grader’s opinion is bound to be different than the other grader. Each grader’s dispositions and cultural background will bound him/her to attribute different amount of weight to a different part of the text, and will attribute more importance to other parts of the text regarding its usefulness in describing the personality. Can this issue be accounted for and controlled?
Even if the subjectivity of the grader can be controlled, how can the subjectivity of the narrator be accounted for? This leads me to the second issue I will raise, which is, “what if the person writing the narrative is not a story-teller”? This is an important question, in my opinion, because it not only shows that the grader’s subjectivity counts, but also the subjectivity of the narrator himself/herself. The person being tested might not be able to express himself/herself through good story telling. A sentence written by the narrator could be intended to mean one thing, but understood differently by the graders. Plus, what makes us so sure that our person of interest isn’t better off giving a life narrative through pictures?
I generally believe that the trend in science will eventually push constructs like personality to be tested objectively.
