Personality questionnaires

tomilipin · Post by **tomilipin** » Sat Dec 04, 2010 7:45 pm

Hello,
I was asked by my seminar teacher to choose a personality test to administer on my students. It's going to be my research project.

I'm looking for a serious personality test or personality questionnaire.

Was thinking about Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) but it's not free. I managed to get a book, 'Essentials of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment' which describes administration, scoring, etc. but it appears that it does not include any questionnaires. I'm actually confused a bit.

I've also read about 'The Big Five' but it seems that this approach is obsolete and not so accurate.

So now I need a professional questionnaire, I am not allowed to design my own tool. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:38 am

Hi Tomilipin! Can I ask why you would want to test students' personalities? (I'm assuming that it would ultimately be in order to separate - segregate? - people into groups containing only as similar types as possible. If this is indeed the case, I can see how that could in some respects aid learning...though I can also see that it could in some other respects deny the students the chance to develop the linguistic resources with which to deal with e.g. avoiding or resolving arguments, conflict resolution etc - all the "bad" stuff of human and social interaction).

Anyway, I don't know if the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II is quite what you're looking for (i.e. good enough), but I thought I'd mention it:
http://www.keirsey.com/sorter/instrumen ... x?partid=0

The following thread about learner strategies (and learner 'types') might also be of interest:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=5235

Finally, you might like to try searching these forums for words like 'aptitude' (which produces 17 results, including a thread entitled 'What kind of character does a good learner have?'), 'personality', etc.

Hope this helps!

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Thu Dec 09, 2010 7:43 pm

Personality tests don't predict anything about people. http://www.psychometric-success.com/per ... -tests.htm

as many as 75% of test takers are assigned a different type when they take the Myers-Briggs a second time.

Some of the "forced-choice" questions are totally absurd. For example, "Would you be more likely murder your boss or donate one of your kidneys to him?" Hey, just pick an answer that is "closest" to your opinion they say. Yeah, right.

You should research the history of this scam http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/isabel-myers.htm.

Isabel Briggs Myers, with a bachelor's degree in political science and no academic affiliation, was responsible for the creation of what has become the most widely used and highly respected personality inventory of all time.

Why has this nonsense been promoted by corporate leaders? An accurate response to that question is not allowed either.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Dec 10, 2010 12:48 am

Heh, I was just trying to help Tomilipin jump through the apparent hoop set by his or her tutor. Like you I also don't take these sorts of tests too seriously, Ouyang! I almost certainly wouldn't administer them on classes of language students (to make fully explicit what I only implied in my reply to Tomilipin), unless the goal was to encourage speech in the form of discussion or debate about the validity of such tests!

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Fri Dec 10, 2010 9:58 pm

Fluffy, you obviously have a "judging - intuitive - extrovert" personality.

You should only date "sensing - perceiving - introverts" who are water or fire signs and born in the year of the ox or the monkey.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Dec 13, 2010 1:13 pm

Thanks for the dating advice, Ouyang! I'll tell you how it goes.