ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss certain methods of assessing behavior in terms of the data appropriate to the approach they wish to employ. There are three general methods for personality assessment: interviewing, psychological testing, and behavioral rating or sampling. In the interview situations, the health care professional is basically concerned with obtaining information about an individual, arrived at by asking questions and acquiring answers, either explicitly or implicitly. The hospital stays are typically brief and frequently demand an assessment of personality organization that goes beyond the interview but is constrained by time. There are basically two types of psychological tests, objective and projective. Objective tests provide fixed questions and permit fixed responses. In contrast to the objective tests, projective tests involve fixed questions that leave the responses open-ended. The test takers are provided with no clue as to whether their answers are correct or incorrect, desirable or undesirable, common or rare.
