A Reliable and Valid Personality Test is Crucial
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If you’re going to do a personality assessment, a reliable and valid personality test is essential for accurately measuring an athlete’s personality so that you can feel confident making informed decisions based on the results.
The importance of a reliable and valid personality test should not be understated.
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What does it mean if a personality test is reliable?
A personality test is reliable if it offers consistent and stable results over time. For instance, it should not matter if you take a personality test while you’re hungry or sleepy: whether you take it Monday when you’ve not had breakfast yet or take it later afternoon on a Sunday before a nap, the results should not be all that different. This is because personality is a relatively stable trait over time and each time you take the test, the results should be similar.
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What does it mean if a personality test is valid?
Validity means that a personality test measures what it intends to measure accurately. For example, if it the scale is called “extraversion”, the test is only valid if the questions on the test actually captures the personality dimension of how extraverted you tend to be.
What are the best personality tests for athletes?
There are many personality tests out there, most of which have been found to be unreliable (meaning that the same person who takes the same test a week later tends to get different scores, indicating the test was not measuring actual personality) and invalid (meaning the factors included on the test did not really reflect the intended personality trait).
We wrote our personality test with the same gold-standard scales used by the most respected social science researchers.
Without these reliable scales, which have been validated in peer-reviewed research, a personality test is useful only as a fun conversation starter. It’s always fun to find out which Harry Potter character you most resemble, but that doesn’t offer many reliable leadership lessons.
If you want to nerd out on this, see this post from Adam Grant, as well as his followup, an academic paper on why tests like the MBTI are not worth it, even more evidence, and why other tests like the Big Five and HEXACO are better. Don’t forget the need for a sixth trait, Honesty-Humility. Lastly, to attempt to be somewhat fair, here are MBTI’s responses.
There are two main personality tests that social scientists use for valid research: HEXACO and Big 5.
The Big 5 is foundational, but has fewer traits and subdimensions to explore, while the HEXACO is related to the Big 5 and has more traits we believe to be very useful in a sports context. That is why our report is grounded in the HEXACO scale: the items we use are abridged and adapted personality scales curated to be most applicable to athletics teams.
The beauty of having valid and reliable scales that social scientists use for peer-reviewed research is that these scales are often open-sourced.
If you are interested in testing your full personality (for free) when it comes to generic areas outside of the sports context, visit https://hexaco.org/hexaco-online.
You can also test your Big 5 personality here: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/.
We feel compelled to offer this caveat any time we discuss personality: personality traits influence the likelihood of certain behaviors. It means that while some behaviors may be more probable than others, our traits don’t dictate behavior in every circumstance.
This is crucial to understand as you work through your own scores of any personality test: if you have a high score in one factor, it does not mean you are always that way.
It simply means that – all else being equal – you are more likely to find certain behaviors easier or harder than someone who has a different score than you.
Knowing your tendencies and your personality can help you figure out a good game plan for working on your leadership style, but it should not define you as a leader.
Happy exploring!
