Introduction

3After sketching the sources of personality concepts and measuring operations, the first part of this book indicates the orientation toward measurement in basic research and introduces the chief themes and theses running through the later content. Then personality is defined as the way a person interacts with the world outside him and the world within him. These interactions are described as processes with distinct phases, processes that can be observed from several perspectives. In each perspective, an observer views and interprets some of these phenomena in a distinctive way. Systematic observations or measurements fall into several classes, depending on characteristics such as who provides the data and who produces the score.