Dr Manju Antil (Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist)

Psychological testing is one of the newest disciplines of one of the youngest sciences - Psychology. It is essentially an objective and standardised measure of a sample of behaviour. Its principal function is to measure differences between individuals or the reactions of the same individual in different situations. Initially, it was employed to identify different grades of feeblemindedness. Over time, its application has grown to cover many activities, including examining emotionally maladjusted, delinquents and other subnormal deviates. In India today, schools are its significant users. They employ psychological testing to classify children between intellectually retarded and the gifted and for educational and vocational counselling. Employers use it in the selection of their crucial staff and normal interviewing.

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The science of psychological testing developed with the growing concern for the care of the mentally disabled, who was the victim of neglect, ridicule and even torture in the 19th century. With the establishment of various institutions for the mentally disabled across Europe and the United States, an objective classification system between the insane and the feebleminded was necessitated for admission to these institutions. The insane were characterised by emotional disorders which might or might not be accompanied by intellectual deterioration from an initial average level, while the feebleminded were identified by an intellectual defect present from birth or early infancy. The first statement of this distinction is probably found in a two-volume work of French physician Esquire, who had devoted over 100 pages to feeblemindedness in 1838. Based on his subject's use of language, Esquire distinguished between two grades of imbecility and three grades of idiocy. At around the same time, another French physician, Seguin, pioneered the training of the feebleminded. He rejected the notion that mental deficiency was incurable. However, the focus of most experimental psychologists at that time was on the formulation of a generalised description of human behaviour rather than the measurement of individual differences. The British biologist Sir Francis Galton was instrumental in launching the testing movement on its course. In 1882, he established an anthropometric laboratory in South Kensington Museum, London, where he measured certain physical traits of individuals such as keenness of vision and hearing, muscular strength, reaction time and other simple sensor motor -function for a small fee. To administer these tests, he devised some simple tests, such as "Gabon bar" and "Gabon whistle". Gabon believed that tests of sensor motor discrimination could serve to gauge a person's intellect. Galton also pioneered rating scale and questionnaire methods and the "free association" technique, subsequently employed for various purposes. He also developed statistical methods for the analysis of data on individual differences.

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Galton's work received a further boost when an American psychologist, James McKean Catelli, developed "mental tests" - a term used for the first time in the psychological literature - in 1890. Chattel's tests, administered annually to college students to determine their intellectual level, were carried out individually and included measures of muscular strength, speed of movement, pain sensitivity, keenness of vision and hearing, weight discrimination, reaction time and memory. Like Galton, Catelli believed that a measure of intellectual functions could be obtained through sensory discrimination and reaction time tests. Some other tests, devised by European psychologists of that period, tended to cover somewhat more complex functions. Kraepelin, for example, devised a long series of tests to measure practice effects, memory and susceptibility to fatigue and distraction. However, he was more interested in the clinical examination of psychiatric patients. French psychologists Binet and Henri formulated a long list of tests of memory, imagination, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic appreciation, and many other functions that eventually developed the renowned Binet-Simon "intelligence scales".

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THE RISE OF INTELLIGENCE TESTS

The Binet-Simon scale, also known as the 1905 Scale, comprised 30 problems arranged in ascending order of difficulty. The difficulty level was set empirically by administering the tests to 50 normal children aged 3 to 11 years and some mentally disabled and feebleminded children. The tests were designed to cover various functions, emphasising judgment, comprehension and reasoning, which Binet regarded as essential components of intelligence. In 1908, Binet increased the number of tests, grouped them into age levels, and called them tests to determine the "mental age" - 1. E. the age of average child whose performance he equalled. In 1911, some more tests were added for ages over 11 years, and the scale was extended to the adult level.

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GROUP TESTING

However, the Binet tests are individual scales, as they are administered to only one person at a time. Many of the tests in these scales require oral responses from the subject or necessitate the manipulation of materials. Such tests are essentially clinical instruments suited to an intensive study of individual cases. Only after the United States entered World War I in 1917 that a group of American army psychologists develop what has come to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta tests to determine the general intellectual level of large groups. Such information was needed to facilitate administrative decisions, like rejection or discharge from military service, assignment to different types of services, or admission to officer teaming camps. At the end of the war, the army tests were released for civilian use - a measure that spurred the growth of large scale testing programs by leaps and bounds. Soon schools were using them to assess the .general intelligence level, or what is commonly known as "IQ" (intelligence quotient) of their pupils.

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SPECIAL APTITUDE TESTS

But gradually, it became apparent that intelligence tests were limited in their coverage, as they primarily measured verbal ability and, to some extent, the ability to handle numerical and other symbolic relations. Moreover, many psychologists realised that the term "intelligence test" was a misnomer since it represented only certain aspects of intelligence. This led to the rise of particular aptitude tests, such as the subjects' mechanical, clerical, musical and artistic abilities and intellectual abilities.

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MEASUREMENT O F PERSONALITY

Still, all these tests failed to measure the overall personality of an individual Efforts were, therefore, directed towards non-intellectual aspects of behaviour, and tests designed for this purpose are commonly known as "personality tested", covering such characteristics as emotional adjustment, social relations, motivation, interests and attitudes.

 An early precursor of personality testing may be recognised in Kraepelin's use of the free association tests with abnormal patients. Sommer (1894) also suggested that the free association test might differentiate between the various forms of mental disorder. Although initially devised for other purposes, many psychologists eventually employed these procedures in constructing some most common types of personality tests. The prototype of the personality questionnaire, or self-report inventory, is the personal data sheet developed by Woodworth during World War I. This test was designed as a rough screening device for identifying seriously neurotic men who would be unfit for military service. In addition, the questionnaire attempted to subdivide emotional adjustment inventories into more specific forms, such as home adjustment, school adjustment, and vocational adjustment.

 Another approach to measuring personality is applying performance or situational tests. In such tests, the subject has a task to perform whose purpose is generally disguised. Most of these tests simulate everyday life situations quite closely. The first extensive application of such techniques is found in the tests developed in the late twenties and early thirties by Harts home, May and their associates (1928-1930). This series, standardised on school children, was concerned with such behaviour as cheating, lying, stealing, cooperativeness and persistence. During World War II, the Assessment Program of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS, 1948) conducted these tests on adults. These tests were concerned with relatively complex and subtle social and emotional behaviour and required elaborate facilities and trained personnel for administration. The interpretation of the subject's responses was also somewhat subjective.

The Projective technique is a third approach to studying personality that has grown phenomenally, especially among clinicians. In such tests, the subject is given a relatively unstructured task that permits wide latitude in its solution. The assumption underlying such methods is that the individual will project his characteristic modes of response into such a task. The projective technique is also more or less disguised in its purpose, like performance and situational tests. However, all personality tests present difficulties, both practical and theoretical.

Moreover, the construction and use of personality inventories are beset with particular difficulties over and above the common problems encountered in psychological testing. For example, the question of faking and malingering is far more acute in personality measurement than in aptitude testing. Yet, there is a silver lining beyond the cloud: the research on personality measurement has reached impressive proportions since 1950, and many ingenious devices and technical improvements are under investigation.

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 TEST RELIABILITY

Psychologists have attempted to develop various methods of determining the reliability of tests. Test reliability indicates how individual differences in test scores are attributable to chance errors of measurement and the extent to which they are attributable to the differences in the characteristic under consideration. In more technical terms, every measure of test reliability denotes what proportion of the total variance of test scores is error variance. An obvious source of error variance is the random fluctuation of performance occurring from one session to another. This may result from uncontrolled testing conditions, such as extreme changes in weather, sudden noises and other distractions. This may also arise from the subject's illness, fatigue, emotional strain or anxiety. This error variance is attributed to what is known in psychological parlance as "temporal stability".

Another problem is presented by the greater situational specificity of responses in the sphere of personality. E.g. an individual might be quite sociable and extroverted at the office, but elsewhere not. Such specificity, in turn, relates to the difficulty of grouping items into clearly defined categories of personality traits. First, personality inventories may be recognised as intrinsically crude instruments and their application restricted accordingly. Most psychologists today would probably accept some combination of the two approaches, although a few may align themselves exclusively behind one or the other. Personality inventories may also be evaluated more fundamentally regarding their theoretical assumptions and underlying rationale. The first concern the type of information that the personality inventories are designed to elicit. The second pertains to the inherent ambiguity of inventory responses. Because the early personality inventories were designed as a rapid substitute for the psychiatric interview, it is frequently assumed that the response to each symptom or die other behaviour characteristics described by the question. Personality inventories have been attacked from another angle because their responses are necessarily ambiguous.

In interpreting test scores, personality and aptitudes cannot be kept apart. An individual's performance on an aptitude test, as well as his performance in school, on the job, or in any other context, is influenced by his achievement drive, his persistence, his value system, his freedom from handicapping emotional problems, and every other characteristic traditionally classified under the heading of "personality". The cumulative effect of personality characteristics on the direction mid extent of the individual's intellectual development is even more critical. The relationship between personality and intellect is reciprocal. Personality characteristics affect intellectual development, but intellectual level also affects personality development. The individual's success in developing and using his aptitudes is bound to influence his emotional adjustment, interpersonal relations, and self-concept. In the self-concept, we can see the mutual influence of aptitudes and personality.

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