science

Individual psychological assessment

Individual psychological assessment is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Individual psychological assessment rather than just read about it. In short: Individual psychological assessment (IPA) is a tool used by organizations to make decisions on employment. IPA allows employers to evaluate and maintain potential candidates for hiring, promotion, and development by using a series of job analysis instruments such as position analysis questionnaires (PAQ), occupational analysis inventory (OAI), and functional job analysis (FJA).

Key takeaways

Individual psychological assessment belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Individual psychological assessment to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Individual psychological assessment from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Individual psychological assessment (IPA) is a tool used by organizations to make decisions on employment. IPA allows employers to evaluate and maintain potential candidates for hiring, promotion, and development by using a series of job analysis instruments such as position analysis questionnaires (PAQ), occupational analysis inventory (OAI), and functional job analysis (FJA). These instruments allow the assessor to develop valid measures of intelligence, personality tests, and a range of other factors as means to determine selection and promotion decisions. Personality and cognitive ability are good predictors of performance. Emotional Intelligence helps individuals navigate through challenging organizational and interpersonal encounters. Since individual differences have a long history in explaining human behavior and the different ways in which individuals respond to similar events and circumstances, these factors allow the organization to determine if an applicant has the competence to effectively and successfully do the work that the job requires. These assessments are administered throughout organizations in different forms, but they share one common goal in the selection process, and that is the right candidate for the job.

Overview In the past, the use of Individual psychological assessment has increased and improved within human resources to evaluate and maintain potential candidates for employment in various levels of position in the workforce. The use of this type of assessment has become defined and set criteria have been developed to test job applicants. By collecting the needed information utilizing the tools listed below, the individual can be assessed as being right for the job at hand.

Individual factors

Personality

Personality is an individual's relatively stable characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, behavior and the psychological mechanisms that support and drive those patterns. The vast majority of investigations of the personality correlates of performance have used the Big Five taxonomy as the basis of their selection of predictors. The Big Five model (or Five Factor Model) holds that personality comprises five dimensions: Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Of the five dimensions, conscientiousness appears to have the strongest relation to overall job performance across a wide variety of jobs.

Leadership style

Leadership style is the behaviors of leaders, focusing on what leaders do and how they act. The relates to how leaders delegate and communicate with their subordinates. Their leadership style may be one or a combination of a(n); authoritarian leadership, democratic leadership, charismatic leadership and laissez-faire leadership.

Cognitive ability

Cognitive ability measures should predict performance outcomes in most, if not all, jobs and situations.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. This form of intelligence allows someone to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and gives them the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought. Assessing an individual's EI enhances the prediction and understanding of the outcomes of organization members, such as their job performance and their effectiveness as leaders within an organization.

Branches There are four dimensions of emotional intelligence:

The Perceiving and Expressing Branch - concerns how accurately and how fast individuals can express emotions and identify, detect, and decipher aspects of emotional experiences and emotional displays The Using Emotion Branch - concerns how well individuals capitalize on the systematic effects of emotions on cognitive activities such as creativity and risking The Understanding Branch - concerns how accurately individuals reason about various aspects of emotions, such as when they attach labels to emotions and identify connections between events and emotional reactions The Regulating Emotions Branch - concerns how well individuals can increase, maintain, or decrease the magnitude or duration of their or others’ emotions

Process Information is collected from an assessor or group of assessors, in person or via other assessment methods. Simulation of exercises related to the job being tested could also be used which takes place in a replicated work setting as the one used on the job. Once all the information is gathered, the assessor(s) presents the information in a special format to the client or organization, grants the participant recommendations based on the assessment and provides feedback to the participant and the organization.

Validity The validity of IPA depends on variables such as the standardization of the tests and personality factors, however important variables is the accuracy of the assessor's judgement. More research is required regarding the assessor's judgment to help improve the effectiveness of the assessments. The way that scientists have conceptualized validity has changed over the past several decades, as documented in the several versions of the APA Standards (AERA et al. 1999) and SIOP (2003) Principles. The most recent versions of both these documents treat validity as a unitary concept that is supported by a variety of evidence. However, The APA Standards and SIOP Principles has documented validity to be the unitary concept that is supported by a variety of evidence (see issue 4 of the 2009 volume and issue 3 of the 2010 volume of Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, respectively).

Assessing individuals The final aspect of industrial and organizational assessment is the assessment of individuals. The analysis includes a broad variety of assessment procedures. Many detailed tools help narrow down the method and result of assessment, including psychological testing, biographical information, interviews, work sampling, surveys, assessment centres, onboarding and computer-based assessment.

Areas of assessment The four main areas of I/O Psychology highlight—Jobs, Work, Performance, and People. Looking at each category gives insight into how Industrial & Organizational Assessment truly works, and what is necessary to complete each step of the process. These four categories can be further broken down.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Individual psychological assessment

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Individual psychological assessment claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Individual psychological assessment before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Individual psychological assessment ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Individual psychological assessment

In research: Individual psychological assessment appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Individual psychological assessment in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Individual psychological assessment is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Industrial and organizational psychology, Psychological tests and scales, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Individual psychological assessment outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Individual psychological assessment in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Individual psychological assessment means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Individual psychological assessment out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Individual psychological assessment in simple terms?

Why does Individual psychological assessment matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Individual psychological assessment?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Individual psychological assessment.