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Can you tell your personality from what flavor ice cream you like? There are lots and lots of so called Personality tests on the web. How do you know when you’ve come across a good one? For example, are the inner workings of your personality revealed in the playlists you have on your smartphone or mp3 device?
In this episode we take a look at the first thing you should demand from any test – reliability. If you’re interested in psychology you are going to learn A LOT about the different kinds of reliability.
Types of Test Reliability
- Test-Retest reliability: people should get about the same score every time they take your test. You can’t score highly on an introversion scale one week and then low the next week (well, you could, but then we’d know that the test is no good).
- Split-Half reliability: if your test had 20 questions (and was measuring just one concept, like shyness) and we correlated the odd questions with the even ones we should get a high positive correlation.
- Alternate Form reliability: in this scenario, psychologists create two questionnaires, both of which measure the same concept (again, such as shyness). We give you one form one week and the other form a week (or month) later. You should score about the same on both forms.
Resources on Personality and Reliability
- Miserandino, M. (2006). “I Scream, You Scream: Teaching Validity and Reliability Via the Ice Cream Personality Test.” Teaching Psychology. 33(4), 265-68.
- Dr. Marianne Miserandino’s homepage at Arcadia University
- If you’re interested in personality, then you should sign up for Dr. Miserandino’s Personality Pedagogy newsletter.
- The ice cream personality test
- The Distorted Tunes test
- The What is Reliability page on psychology.about.com lists a few more types of test reliability.
Here’s the video of the crow having fun (?):










