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The Uses of Psychological Test!
Psychology is a science of behaviour. Behaviour may be implicit or explicit. Explicit behaviour can be understood more easily than implicit behaviour.
However, the human behaviour is influenced by many factors.
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These factors cannot be understood easily by casual observation. Psychological tests help us in this direction.
Anne Anastasi, a famous psychologist in field of psychological testing has defined as, ‘A psychological test is essentially an objective and standardised measure of a sample of behaviour’.
Another definition states that, “A psychological test is a standardised procedure to measure quantitatively or qualitatively one or more than one aspect of a trait by means of a sample of verbal or non-verbal behaviour”.
From the above definitions, it is clear that a psychological test is a structured technique used to generate a carefully selected sample of behaviour. This behaviour sample is used in turn, to make inferences about the psychological attributes among the people like intelligence, self-esteem etc.
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Historically, it was English biologist Francis Galton who was primarily responsible for launching the testing movement. He devised a number of tests, many of which are still in use like the Galton Bar and the Galton whistle. He was also a pioneer in the application of rating-scale and questionnaire methods.
Another important person in psychological testing was American psychologist James Mickeen Cattell. In 1840, he used the term ‘Mental test’ for the first time. In 1895, Kraeplin prepared a test to measure the basic factors in characterisation of a person.
In 1905, Binet and Simon developed the first standardized intelligence test. Most of these tests were essentially individual tests. During the World War First, the Army Alpha and Army Beta group tests were developed by American psychologists association for mass testing of army personnel, for literates and illiterates respectively. Since then the use and application of psychological tests has become a practice in most of the fields of academics and occupations.