However, Pittenger is cautious about these reliability numbers because they don’t consider the fact that even changing just one letter is a serious change. He cites several studies, all of which indicate a high test-retest reliability for individuals. Pittenger also argues that the test-retest reliability for the MBTI is suspect. Essentially, the researchers found that people exist somewhere along the extroversion/introversion scale, and not squarely in one or the other as the test suggests. If, in reality, personality types really are mutually exclusive, then “there should be separate distributions of scores representing extroverts and introverts, and each distribution should have an independent mean and standard deviation” (471). This indicates that most people’s answers put them somewhere in between extrovert and introvert, but the test categorizes them as either extrovert or introvert based off of which they lean towards the most, however slight the lean. They found that the distribution of scores is actually normal.
For example, Stricker and Ross (1962), Hicks (1984), and McCrae and Costa (1989) graphed data about introversion/extroversion from a collection of MBTI results. However, researchers have found that the test does not produce bimodal data. For this blog post, I’ll review some of the conclusions and studies that he cites.įirst, Pittenger explains that the data from a sample of tests should look bimodal because the categories are mutually exclusive- for example, you are coded as either thinking or feeling, but not both. Like me, Pittenger is interested in answering the question: Is the MBTI valid and reliable? Or, in other words, does the MBTI consistently measure what it says it measures? To be even more specific, does the MBTI consistently measure an individual’s personality? Pittenger answers this question by reviewing numerous studies that measure the validity and reliability of the MBTI. I found an article by David Pittenger in the Review of Educational Research (a peer-reviewed journal that is published by the American Education Research Association). I was curious about the answer to our question, so I decided to research the MBTI for my blog post. In particular, we were wondering if the test is really able to accurately determine personality type.
Last class, a few of us were talking about the MBTI 1 during the break.
0 kommentar(er)
