TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT

Much of traditional personality assessment and therefore testing is based upon psychodynamic theory, as found in Freud's writings, for example, and trait theory, as the work of Gordon Allport and of Raymond B. Cattell, for example. Both of these approaches view personality as the central aspect to understand, predict, or alter behavior. Both of these approaches assume that there are a number of dimensions called traits (or drives, needs, motives, etc.) that exist within the individual, are relatively stable, and give consistency to behavior – that is, knowing that a person is high on aggression allows us to predict with some accuracy that the individual will behave in certain ways across a number of situations. In both of these approaches, we infer that certain dimensions exist and that behavior is a “sign” of such underlying dimensions. Thus, the responses of a subject to the Beck Depression Inventory are seen as evidence that the subject is (or is not) depressed. The test performance is an indicator, a sign of the underlying hypothesized construct.