PsyCen seminar series

Speaker

Sara Liiamo, visiting doctoral researcher at Leeds Beckett University from the University of Eastern Finland.

Title

Deconstructing Personality Tests: Respondents’ Interpretations from Intersectional Social Positions

Abstract

Personality tests have become embedded in everyday institutional practices, including working life, education, healthcare, the military and the legal system. Tests' widespread use is grounded in a culturally dominant idea that individuals’ thinking, feeling, and behaviour are primarily shaped by their relatively stable personality traits. This individual-psychological perspective also informs research on personality testing, which has largely relied on psychometric approaches.

In response to the lack of qualitative empirical research, this paper examines PRF and NEO-PI-3 personality tests through the interpretations of test respondents. Combining critical discursive psychology with intersectional theory, the study draws on 'think-aloud' interviews in which participants are asked to describe how they interpret test questions and decide how to answer them. The analysis shows how respondents' interpretations of the tests and their response strategies are shaped by their intersectional social positions. It also demonstrates how personality testing operates as a discursive practice that generates normative assumptions about subjectivity, often translating complex lived experiences into individualised psychological traits.

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Host or Publisher LBU - Centre for Psychological Research (PsyCen).