Vocational Assessment Test Review: Myers Briggs Type Indicator
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality assessment that can help guide people to suitable vocations, but which is also useful in other scenarios. It was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cooks Briggs, from a Jungian psychology perspective. Although they began working on it in the early 1940s, it was first published in 1962. It is a self-report questionnaire, which examines the individual's preferences along different components of personality. It was created for a normal population distribution and can be used for members of any demographics that can process the test, though it is probably most appropriate for late teens and beyond; perhaps ages 14 and up. The MBTI is a multiple-choice test and is written at a 7th grade reading level. It takes approximately 20-30 minutes to administer the test, but the test is not timed and individual reading speed and how long it takes to reach a decision on each answer will impact individual test-taking time.
The MBTI uses four pairs of contrasting traits to look at personality: "extroversion-introversion (E-I), sensation-intuition (S-N), thinking-feeling (T-F), and judgment-perception (J-P). As a result of the interactions among these preferences, 16 distinctive personality types are identified by the instrument. The MBTI score also indicates the strength of the preference for each dimension. Stronger scores indicate a greater likelihood that the individual has developed the attributes associated with those preferences (Fretwell et al., 2013). The test is not looking specifically at vocational aptitudes, but, instead, is looking at broader personality characteristics. However, those broader characteristics are then associated with success in or aptitude...
The tests use of four scales is based on Carl Jung's theory of personality, which suggested that there are four principal functions that impact an individual's perception and experience of the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. The test puts those functions on a continuum from one another (sensation-intuition and feeling-thinking) but also looks at introversion-extraversion and judging-perceiving.
The MBTI been subjected to significant research over its lifetime, and it has been judged to be a reliable self-report inventory (Carlyn, 1977). However, there is some expert disagreement about the utility of the types described by the MBTI, which leaves some wondering what the test actually measures (Scott, 1999). "A latent trait/latent class analysis showed that at least three (the extraversion-introversion, thinking-feeling and judgment-perception) of the four subscales were best conceptualised as a normally distributed latent trait" (Scott, 1999). In other words, if you placed the ends of the subscales on a graph, you would see a roughly normal bell-shaped distribution, which smaller percentages of the population exhibiting traits strongly affiliated with either extreme, and the majority of the population distributing some combination of those traits. The test appears to be a valid measure of personality, as defined by the test and by Jungian psychology, but whether those underlying concepts are valid is a discussion that is still considered debatable. The MBTI does appear to be reliable, as it does not examine mood, but underlying personality traits, and appears to have high test / re-test reliability, suggesting that the MBTI is successful in measuring underlying personality characteristics rather than capturing mood.
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