TYPE INDICATOR


Type Indicator

by Alexander Hiam

Participants study personality types to make it easier to understand and get along with others, reduce conflicts and improve teamwork.

Data Analysis and Validity

History of the Instrument
The Type Indicator, a forced-choice self-assessment with ten items for each of four scales, is based on Jung’s work on personality type. Carl Jung introduced the schema of types in the 1920s, starting with the observation that some people tend toward extroversion and others toward introversion. He assumed (without statistical evidence) that the distribution of these types was bimodal, with many people having a strong preference toward one or the other type. Contemporary studies of this scale and the others in his model lead to a different conclusion—distributions tend to follow a standard normal curve with the majority of people clustering in the middle of the scales. For example, McCrae & Costa report after studying patterns of scores from a sample of approximately 500 people that “there was no support for the view that the MBTI measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types.” Nonetheless, conventional practice still treats Yung’s scales as bimodal or dichotomous, rather than true scales, and tests based on his schema follow the practice of sorting test-takers into pairs of preferences.
Today, many supervisors, managers and other employees in a wide range of professions have been exposed at least once to a test of type that is based on Jung’s work. The type taxonomy in most popular use today reflects refinements to Jung’s schema by a mother-daughter team who lend their names to the most popular commercial version of the test, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (or MBTi, published by Consulting Psychologists Press). According to jacket copy on a recent book by one of the authors who has prepared technical manuals on this test, “The popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) among counselors, psychotherapists, educators, businesses, organizational consultants, and government agencies has made it the most widely used tool for the assessment of healthy personality.”
This quote hits the nail on the head in its summing-up of the popular platform for the MBTI and similar tests of type. They are widely used by consultants and others who do not have advanced psychological degrees and credentials, and the tests are much more commonly used for presumed-to-be healthy groups of test-takers than in clinical settings. As such, the Jungian type tests clearly have found their niche in consulting, education and development, rather than on the clinical side.
Request for a Classroom Version
As a developer of a wide range of personal style assessments for use in adult and young adult education and development (in areas such as leadership style, conflict-handling style, so-called emotional intelligence, and other areas involving interpersonal style and skills), I am often in contact with practitioners who use tests for educational and developmental purposes. Most of the time, the tests I design are used in workshops and classes. Because of this background, I frequently receive questions about personality type and how best to introduce the concept in classroom settings.
Formal personality tests tend, because of the challenges of validity and rigor, to have a number of qualities that make them difficult to use in most workshops and classes, such as a large number of items, relatively long test-taking and feedback processes, and the need for a certified or specialized test administrator. The average instructor is stymied by these factors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the average instructor often cobbles together something from photocopied materials taken from books and Web sites and attempts to administer an inadequate type test of some kind, simply to give students some sense of the test-taking experience, since it is considered desirable to explore personality in a hands-on manner. At my training materials publishing firm, Trainer’s Spectrum, we have received many requests for some form of a teaching tool that could be used to give students a rapid, simple introduction to the concept of type testing, along with a personal score that would be presented in an appropriate, ethical manner and would be based on well-designed, professional items that captured the core concepts of the Jungian dimensions or scale in a reasonably valid and accurate manner.
The main purpose of my development effort was to meet this need, and so the design, development and testing processes were structured by a focus on the creation of a teaching tool. With this specific and narrow focus (which is quite different from the purposes motivating other designers of Jungian type tests), we set out to design a short, easy-to-administer, easy-to-take, educational test along with a booklet of thought-provoking information and questions about the history and nature of personality tests. We also reviewed the extensive literature on validity of earlier tests, with the goal of identifying any problematic assumptions or design issues so as to attempt to eliminate them from our test.
Architecture of the Type Indicator
The result of these efforts, the Type Indicator, is a teaching tool designed to provide an introduction to the concept of Jungian types by giving students a quick, simple way to generate self-scores of types for use in educational classroom discussion or self-study. The type designations follow current convention, which is dictated by the work of Myers and Myers Briggs since their version of the Jungian type test is by far the most widespread and well known, and since many of our reviewers told us they intended to use the Type Indicator in organizations in which students would later be taking the MBTi as part of a more lengthy, higher level course. The desired test design produces 16 possible types scores in the familiar four-letter pattern reflecting four sets of personal preferences. These scales are labeled with letter codes and each score consists of four codes, one from each scale or pair, as follows:
E = Extroverted
I = Introverted
S = Sensing
N = Intuitive
T = Thinking
F = Feeling
J = Judging
P = Perceiving
Many organizational consultants and workplace trainers administer the MBTi or use one of the many less systematic diagnostics which proliferate in the form of on-line tests, published booklets and books in order to identify participants by four-letter type (participants being organization members, team members, or class/workshop members). As a consequence, many people in workplaces can and do identify themselves by type code, and also take an interest in others’ types and how they differ from their own. As a practical matter, many people report that they find such type information useful in understanding, discussing, and accommodating differences in work style and approach (although the validity of this approach, which sometimes seem to involve labeling and the possibility of perceptual biases, will be considered in the section of this report on validity).
The study of personality type can of course be undertaken in other ways as well. The FIRO-B, the Big Five, Insight Inventory and many other typologies of personality exist and some of them may have greater utility than Jungian types depending on the purpose or application. The Type Indicator was based on Jungian types rather than any of these other models for several reasons:
  • Jung’s model arose early in the exploration of personality, making it of particular interest when teaching and learning about the history of personality type and a natural starting-point for publishing teaching-oriented personality tests for use in classroom settings.
  • The Jungian types are still in widespread use today and seem to resonate with many consultants and employees in workplaces. The intuitive appeal of this model appears to be strong; the model and its set of 16 four-letter codes seems to be more popular and intriguing in workplaces than other personality models. This points to the model as a good place to begin a learning process about personalities and how they may differ.
  • There has been considerable research on the validity and applicability of the Jungian types, much of it using versions of the MBTI, which have been made available by its publisher for research purposes. While findings are mixed, there is evidence to support the idea that the four underlying scales have reasonable levels of construct validity, although the independence of them and the more elaborate interpretations of them made by some consultants may be less certain. (I will review this research in the section on validity.)
  • Numerous other authors have published diagnostic tools and tests for assessing Jungian types, and there is both anecdotal and in some cases statistical evidence to support the hypothesis that alternate methods can successfully measure type and give test-takers useful and reasonably accurate scores, with good correspondence between the results of different tests. (For example, one study reports good correlations between a simple adjective-based test of type and a formal MBTI test.) It is encouraging that the underlying constructs seem to be able to be measured in many ways using many forms and types of tests.
  • As Bayne points out, the MBTI and other tests based on Jungian type preference have a “positive tone” that make them “relatively unthreatening to complete and interpret.” The Type Test is particularly “user-friendly” and non-threatening, plarty because of the positive sounding scales Jung used. For example, there is nothing wrong with feeling or thinking—they form ends of a scale without creating an obvious negative or incorrect option.
For these reasons and because of frequent requests, we decided to use the four type scales and resulting sixteen types as the basis of a forced-choice self-assessment activity in a booklet designed to introduce the concept of type-testing. (The selection of the forced-choice format will be discussed shortly.)
Defining the Scales and Types
Once the decision to develop the Type Indicator was made, the literature was examined for consistent characterizations of the four dimensions and sixteen types, and these were compiled into a working descriptive table for discussion and critique practitioners.
Once we began to search for information about the types, we were quickly inundated with sources. There has been an amazing amount of publishing on the topic, both in academic circles and in the popular literature. There appeared to be considerable variation in published interpretations of the types, but generally there seemed to be a central consensus that we could work from. Tables 1 and 2 summarize these conclusions.
As you can see from the layout of Table 1, Jung and later authors impute differing functions to each of the four scales. I decided to define these as source of energy, method of understanding, method of deciding, and approach to taking action, as these seemed clear, common-sense phrases that would help keep item development consistent in focus.
Perhaps the single simplest and clearest description of the four scales is provided by Bayne, who writes, “I suggest ‘outgoing’ or ‘reserved’, ‘practical’ or ‘interested in possibilities’, ‘like to analyse’ or ‘sympathetic’, ‘like to plan’ or ‘easygoing’ as capturing central aspects of each pair of preferences.”
Table 1. Core descriptors of the four scales (for use in item design)
Source of Energy
Extroverted: Outgoing, social, interacting with people gives you energy

Introverted: Introspective, thoughtful, you use time alone to recharge
Mthod of Understanding
Sensing: Seek relevant information, think conceptually

Intuitive: Seek patterns, think more theoretically and creatively
Method of Deciding
Thinking: Logical, rational decision-making

Feeling: More emotional and people-oriented decision-making
Approach to Taking Actions
Judging: Plan and organize your actions thoughtfully

Perceiving: Juggle multiple tasks and perform well under pressure
There is a world of difference between the schema in Table 1 and Table 2. Table 1 represents four scales, each fairly well defined and likely to be at least partially independent of the others. (There are some troubling partial correlations which we attempted to minimize; see later discussion under Construct Validity.) Some of these scales are measured by other test instruments as well (for example, the Big Five personality tests also measure extroversion-introversion), which adds strength to the conceptual validity of them, and all of them correlate to some degree to the Big Five which also lends credence to the underlying construct (but validity will be explored in depth in a few pages so I will not go into the topic here).
The construct appeared straightforward and fairly easy to write items to, which gave use further encouragement in our work. However, the conversion of the four scores to 16 distinct types was less clear and harder to design to. An examination of table 2 brings this challenge into focus.
Page 1