Yeah, personality theories and tests are pretty interesting stuff. I've tended to avoid the technical in this thread coz it's more for fun. But the MBTI suffers on a few levels for me.
Construct validity: the theoretical underpinnings of this test are pretty arbitrary IMHO and I don't think the test actually even measures those theoretical constructs very accurately.
Content validity: the facets it DOES measure it only measures a very narrow aspect of them and so would do better to make more modest claims about what it IS measuring. I find I get measured as an extrovert because I have performance confidence. Doing things in front of an audience/public speaking without preparation all that sort of thing. But those are skills I have learned more than personality aspects and many introverted people "come out of themselves" with the confidence that wearing a costume or mask can give. However I think of myself as an introvert because I need solitary time especially after a social interaction. So it is trying to measure my cognitions and emotions based on behaviour which is not representative (at least in my case).
If you just look at measuring concrete behaviours to predict future behaviours (Criterion validity) it could be much better if it just focussed on that.
Also, the methodology is all subjective and so if people put in what they believe about themselves they will typically generate a summary which is what they believe about themselves. If this is all you want then it's actually rather good, but if you want to measure the accuracy of those personal beliefs it doesn't really help and so how well it compares to similar measures (concurrant validity) is limited to other subjective measures.
Now... if you read this and think I'm not a big fan of the test I couldn't blame you. And basically I do think it's a pretty crap measure of personality. But I have a few caveats:
I don't believe there is a current personality theory which actually does the job that professionals or laypeople want from them, so I'm gonna be critical of all of them. Not that this is the best of a bad bunch per se, but it could be worse
Also, it is SO widely used by people that there is an enormous amount of data which can in turn serve to measure the construct and concurrent validity of other tests by having them account for the findings of the MBTI.
Mostly though, something that interests me is comparing distribution of results in a sample against a population. So in a broad sample which represents the wider population the distribution of types is pretty well documented because there is so many data. So when (I forget the name of the researcher) measured Bronies and found their distribution was different than the populations they were sampled from it might not be able to accurately define what makes Bronies different but I can say with authority that Bronies' distribution of types IS atypical.
That is in fact why I started this. Even though it's not a rigorous experiment design, I was curious if the distribution of scores varied from the general population and in what way and if so was it in the same was as Bronies (since our fandoms are quite similar). Then if that is established (and you would want to replicate it on a bugger scale of course) is there a correlation between types and some other feature peculiar to Furries. Here I'm thinking of how atypical the sexual orientation distribution is. IF that was the case then without having a good test of personality you could have, in effect, a predictive test for sexual orientation which doesn't ask about sexual orientation.
Then as better understanding of biological causes of orientation are known they can be measured against personality theories and actually lead to better theory and measures.
TL;DR I'm Xavier Cross!! Yay *cartwheels*
Topic: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Read 12930 times)