Psychological Assessments - The Three Key Aspects

Psychological assessments are done by skilled professionals, generally psychologists, by using specific psychological techniques and tools in order to attain some knowledge about a person's personality and behavior traits. Things such as money can be easily measured but traits like personality, attitude, intelligence and beliefs are not easily quantifiable. However, if you really want to apprehend the psyche of human beings, understanding and evaluating them is important. Irrespective of what job you are doing, whether it is of hiring people, teaching students, developing teams and building relationships, or just a quest to understand yourself, it is very useful to appraise these latent and less obvious traits. One way of going about it is through psychometric testing.

Knowing and understanding a person involves much more than just observing his/her manifested behaviour. You have to probe deep into it and try the gather observations that are not fully manifested or intended. However, ensure that you are keeping biasness and stereotypes out of the picture as they can really harm your judgement. A psychometric testing must be objective with impartial judgment to be truly successful. To ensure this, the following three criteria must be met:

1.  Standardisation – The test should be conducted taking a sample population that represents the rest of the people correctly. Testing and evaluating every working individual of a country is improbable. So, taking a sample out of it is useful, at the same time effective.

2.  Consistency – The test should produce consistent and reliable results every time you do it. It should not be influenced by outside factors like stress. For example, your test results should be the same whether you are relaxed or stressed. Then only psychological assessments will be fruitful and operative.

3.  Validity – It is conceivably the most vital quality of a psychological test. There is validity when the test measures what it was planned to measure. For instance, if it was directed towards determining an individual's interests, it should then only demonstrate that and not something else that pertains a little towards interests. Beating around the bush is completely deplorable in psychology and especially during psychological assessments.

Posted in: Key Aspects of Psychological Assessments