Question

Blake has developed a new measure of personality to assess what personality type people have. It is called the “Blockbuster Personality Type” measure. The measure includes images from the top ten most popular Hollywood movies in the last ten years and asks respondents to describe what is happening in the scenes. Responses are scored in terms of how consistent they are with the original movies, and how much respondents show empathy for the different characters in the scenes. As a result of this scoring, respondents are classified as either being either “active heroes”, “passive victims”, or “conniving villains”, reflecting the hidden desires and goals that they were born with. Blake wants to encourage people to use the test for selection and recruitment in organisations around the world, so he collects information about the test’s reliability and validity. He asks his first-year psychology class to take the test at the start of semester and at the end of semester and compares their scores for a measure of reliability. To test validity, he uses scores on the test to predict how well his students do in their university studies.

Question: What are some of the issues with what Blake has done? How could he have designed and evaluated his test in a better way? For each issue you identify, explain why it is an issue and how it could be improved.

Answer 1

Though here Blake has got a new approach, but it's validity is incorrect,he has done based on only Hollywood movie heros. Some may go on appreciating their favourite hero whereas tland also would not like a particular hero. Here the bias in involved.

Secondly the categories of personality which he has made cmvillans, active heros etc are not based upon the true nature of the person. There should be categories which measure creativity, how much the person is self dedicated, how far the person is open etc. It should not have been based upon Hollywood. Some even dislikes Hollywood.

And the statistics which he is using is also not right. The students in college are very sensitive hence they may like or dislikes particular hero based upon their current thoughts. He is comparing it to the initial test.

Blake should have conducted a proper experimental research methods. He should have seen how much or how far it matches with the personality. He should have gone for statistics such as coorelational coefficient, standard deviations and thhen conducted test.