One of the approaches to evaluate the characteristics of one’s individual personality is with personal inventories. Personal inventories are tests or scales that rely on self-report to determine one’s personality using the subject’s behaviours, thoughts and feelings. There are many personality tests on the internet that attempt to categorise one’s personality using various questions but the one I’ll be critiquing is the 16personalities test.
The 16personality test uses the theory of phycological type but rebalances the Big Five personality traits in a more modern and social dimension. It uses similar features as the MBTI but instead uses five scales rather than four to make it more applicable people. The test attempts to demonstrate
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This is proven by the Cronbach's alpha. The Cronbach’s alpha is used when items are used to make a scale to ultimately determine if they have internal consistency (Bland J Martin, Altman Douglas G., 1997). Low alpha values indicate that the questions being asked to the subject are not producing dependable results. According to the 16personality test records, they have values ranging between 0.70-0.90 indicating that there is redundancy in the test values. This determines that the 16personality is a reliable personal inventory. Furthermore, the test is also reliable because it also uses another variable to test its reliability known as the test-retest reliability. The test-retest reliability displays how much correlation there is between the original test done and the retake. As seen in 16personality test records, they have high test-retest reliability of over 0.70 higher indicating that there is less variability, ultimately producing reliable results. Another way reliability is promoted throughout the personality test is through the lack of true and false questions. True and false questions force the subject to relate to a statement and question they might not relate to and ultimately forces them to decide on the spot (Danielson, 2018). Due to the flexible choices present in the 16personality test, they subject can relate to the question better as it is based off from a scale which overall decreases the bias. Although the test produces reliable results majority of the time, one’s environment and mindset at that given moment plays a role in the answering of questions for the personality test. According to Wake Forest University’s Professor Willian Fleeson, our behaviours and experiences are based on different states dependent on the environment and our mindset (Luke Semilie, 2014). It is displayed in the paper “Correction for faking in self-report