Discussion:
Eight Basic Perspectives on Personality
1. Explain the eight basic perspectives on personality and what are the usefulness of studying the eight perspectives of personality psychology? (The eight basic perspectives on personality are Psychoanalytic, Neo-analytic. Cognitive, Biological, Behaviorist, Trait/skill, Humanistic/existential and Person-situation interactionist).
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of an objective approach to personality assessment? A subjective approach? How are the concepts of reliability and validity approached from these two ways of assessing personality and give some examples?
3. Take one element of the theories or ideas and apply it to a real person - for example, someone from current events, politics, business, sports, the entertainment field. Define the terms you're using, and apply them to an aspect of this person's life (a specific action, behavior, or decision, for example). How can we understand this person more fully by using this concept to understand him/her?
4. Explain how personality is studied scientifically. What is Personality? How is Personality Studied and Assessed? Explain basic issues in the study of personality including the importance of the unconscious, the role of the self, nomothetic versus idiographic approaches, gender differences, the power of the situation, and cultural influences and why objective measures of personality are important. Describe different kinds of reliability including internal-consistency reliability and test-retest reliability.
5. Describe different kinds of validity including construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, criterion-related validity, and content validity.