Assessment of Psychological Attributes

Assessment of Psychological Attributes

Psychological attributes are involved in everything from simple phenomena like reaction time — the time taken to respond to a stimulus — to highly global concepts like happiness. It is difficult to count or specify exactly how many psychological attributes can be assessed. Assessment is the first step in understanding any psychological attribute.

Assessment refers to the measurement of psychological attributes of individuals and their evaluation, often using multiple methods in terms of certain standards of comparison. An attribute is said to exist in a person only if it can be measured using scientific procedures. For example, when we say "Harish is dominant," we are referring to the degree of dominance in Harish. This statement is based on our own assessment of dominance in him.

Our assessment may be informal or formal.

• Formal assessment is objective, standardised, and organised.
• Informal assessment varies from case to case and from one assessor to another, and is therefore open to subjective interpretations.

Psychologists are trained in making formal assessments of psychological attributes. Once assessment is done, we can use this information to predict how a person will probably behave in the future. For instance, we may predict that Harish, if given a chance to lead a team, will most likely be an authoritarian leader. If the predicted consequence is not what we want, we may intervene to effect a change in Harish's behaviour.

The attribute chosen for assessment depends upon our purpose. To help a weak student perform well in examinations, we may assess their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. If a person fails to adjust with members of their family and neighbourhood, we may consider assessing their personality characteristics. For a poorly motivated person, we may assess their interests and preferences. Psychological assessment uses systematic testing procedures to evaluate abilities, behaviours, and personal qualities of individuals.

Some Domains of Psychological Attributes

Psychological attributes are not linear or unidimensional. They are complex and expressed in terms of dimensions. A line is a mere aggregate of many points; a point occupies no space. But a box occupies space and can be described only in terms of its three dimensions — length, width, and height. Similarly, psychological attributes are usually multi-dimensional. If you want a complete assessment of a person, you need to assess how they function in various domains such as cognitive, emotional, social, and so on.

The important attributes that interest psychologists are categorised on the basis of varieties of tests used in psychological literature.

1. Intelligence

Intelligence is the global capacity to understand the world, think rationally, and use available resources effectively when faced with challenges. Intelligence tests provide a global measure of a person's general cognitive competence, including the ability to profit from schooling. Generally, students having low intelligence are not likely to do well in school-related examinations, but their success in life is not associated only with their intelligence test scores.

2. Aptitude

Aptitude refers to an individual's underlying potential for acquiring skills. Aptitude tests are used to predict what an individual will be able to do if given proper environment and training. A person with high mechanical aptitude can profit from appropriate training and can do well as an engineer. Similarly, a person having high language aptitude can be trained to be a good writer.

3. Interest

Interest is an individual's preference for engaging in one or more specific activities relative to others. Assessment of interests of students may help decide what subjects or courses they can pursue comfortably and with pleasure. Knowledge of interests helps us in making choices that promote life satisfaction and performance on jobs.

4. Personality

Personality refers to relatively enduring characteristics of a person that make them distinct from others. Personality tests try to assess an individual's unique characteristics — for example, whether one is dominant or submissive, outgoing or withdrawn, moody or emotionally stable. Personality assessment helps us to explain an individual's behaviour and predict how they will behave in future.

5. Values

Values are enduring beliefs about an ideal mode of behaviour. A person having a value sets a standard for guiding their actions in life and also for judging others. In value assessment, we try to determine the dominant values of a person — for example, political, religious, social, or economic.

Assessment Methods

Several methods are used for psychological assessment. Here are the key features of each method.

Psychological Test

A psychological test is an objective and standardised measure of an individual's mental and/or behavioural characteristics. Objective tests have been developed to measure all the dimensions of psychological attributes (intelligence, aptitude, etc.) described above. These tests are widely used for clinical diagnosis, guidance, personnel selection, placement, and training. Besides objective tests, psychologists have also developed certain projective tests, especially for the assessment of personality.

Interview

Interview involves seeking information from a person on a one-to-one basis. You may see it being used when a counsellor interacts with a client, a salesperson makes a door-to-door survey regarding the usefulness of a particular product, an employer selects employees for their organisation, or a journalist interviews important people on issues of national and international importance.

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