The purpose of this study is to report the findings concerning the comparative diagnostic value of two personality tests, the Bell Adjustment Inventory (Student form) and the Minnesota Personality Scale, for use in student counseling. The Bell Adjustment Inventory has been used for the past six years as a part of the battery of tests given during New Student Days at Grinnell College, with apparently satisfactory results. However, with the development of the new Minnesota Personality Scale, it was felt by the college personnel department that perhaps this test would prove of even greater diagnostic value in the counseling program

Laurie, Gloria

Lovell, George D.

Marvin, Doris

Name not available

A Compalison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling

University of Northern Iowa

Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science Volume 54 Annual Issue Article 38 1947 A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling George D. Lovell Grinnell College Gloria Laurie Grinnell College Doris Marvin Grinnell College Let us know how access to this document benefits you Copyright ©1947 Iowa Academy of Science, Inc. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias Recommended Citation Lovell, George D.; Laurie, Gloria; and Marvin, Doris (1947) "A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling," Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, 54(1), 247-251. Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol54/iss1/38 This Research is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa Academy of Science at UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science by an authorized editor of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@uni.edu. A · Compalison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling GEORGE D. LOVELL, GLORIA LAURIE, AND DORIS MARVIN Introduction and Purpose The purpose of this study is to report the findings concerning the comparative diagnostic value of two personality tests, the Bell Ad-justment Inventory (Student form) and the Minnesota Personality Scale, for use in student counseling. The Bell Adjustment Inventory has been used for the past six years as a part of the battery of tests given during New Student Days at Grinnell College, with ap-parently satisfactory results. However, with the development of the new Minnesota Personality Scale, it was felt by the college per-sonnel department that perhaps this test would prove of even greater diagnostic value in the counseling program. Background The Minnesota Scale is a combination of three tests developed at the University of Minnesota: the Minnesota Scale for the Survey of Opinions, and two Minnesota Inventories on Social Attitudes. After adminiRtration of these three tests, a factor analysis was made, on the baRis of which non-differentiating and overlapping items were eliminated. The revision and combination of the three tests, now known as the Minnesota Personality Scale, measures Morale, Social adjustment, Family Relations, Emotionality, and Economic Conser-vatism. Student response to questions such as, "Do you get along as well as the average person in social activities?" consists of marking standard answer blanks; Almost Always, Frequently, Occasionally, Rarely, or Almost Never. When administered to groups of 1,500 freshmen students entering the University of Minnesota, the scale gave no odd-even correlation lower than .93. The Bell Adjustment Inventory measures four areas: Health, Home, Emotional and Social Adjustment. In response to questions such as, "Do you often feel lonesome even when you are with people?" stud-ents circle on the test booklet "yes," "no," or "?," the latter indi-cating that the student is uncertain how to answer the question or that it does not apply to him. The test claims high reliability, having been revised in 1938 and administered to sixteen groups of college freshmen and juniors from different parts of the country. The re-ported relia.bility coefficient for Home Adjustment was .89, for So-cial Adjustment, .89, for Health, .80, for Emotional Adjustment, .85. An experiment similar to the one to be reported compared results of the Bell and Washburne Inventories to results of faculty rating reports. The correlations between the Bell Inventory and the faculty 247 1Lovell et al.: A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell AdjuPublished by UNI ScholarWorks, 1947248 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE [VOL. 54 ratings ranged from -.316 to .165: between the Washburne Inventory and the faculty ratings, from -.298 to .348. (Clark, 1942). Procedure The procedure for the comparison of the two Inventories was as follows: 1. The Minnesota Personality Sea.le was administered to a Gen-eral Psychology class during a regularly scheduled class hour with no advance notice that su~h a test would be given. The class of 83 stuaents, 27 male and 56 female, was composed largely of students of sophomore standing, with a few juniors and seniors. The students were informed at the time of administration that a study was being made of the Minnesota test and their results would in no way affect their class grades. The C'lass gave gratifying cooperation. 2. Since, in the majority of cases, scores of the Bell Adjustment Inventory for each student were already available from past testing programs, it was not necessary to administer the Bell test. However, in some cases, because of a change in the method of recording the Bell Scores, only word descriptions covering a certain numerical range were available. For these terms, Good, Average, Satisfactory, etc., the midpoint of the numerical range which the term included was assigned as the students' Bell scores. The number of such cases was small enough not to affect the results materially. 3. As a basis for comparison of the two tests, a personality rat-ing scale was developed. The questions of both tests were analyzed to secure the objective components of the personality traits as indi-cated by the questions. According to Freyd, ( 1923) Furfey ( 1926) and Guilford, ( 1924) a five-step graphic scale has been found to be the best measuring device to be used by untrained raters. Short ques-tions were used: for example, "How does he react to criticism?" Op-posite the question, below a continuous line, were five objective de-scriptions representing a continuum of the behavior. In order to counteract the "halo effect," the high-low direction of the continua 'Nas varied. Because of the nature of the various traits, the number of items per trait varied. There were three items for Social Adjustment, two for Family Relations, and six for Emotionality. One item of this latter group concerned health, since it was also included with Emo-tionality in the Minnesota test. This item was weighted separately for correlation with the Health Adjustment section of the Bell test. The first draft of the rating scale was submitted to an advanced psychology class which had been studying rating scale construction, and to other trained advisors, in order to be sure that the five steps for each question did represent psychologically equally spaced steps of a continuum, that the phraseology was clear, and that each item ctid, as far as possible, actually measure the aspect of the personality trait intended. As a result of this analysis of the original draft, sev-eral revisions and improvements were made in the rating scale items. 2Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, Vol. 54 [1947], No. 1, Art. 38https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol54/iss1/381947] COMPARISON OF TESTS 249 4. A week after the administration of the Minnesota Personality Scale, the subjects were asked to fill out a mimeographed form naming five of their closest campus friends. It was explained that these five friends would be asked to rate them. Until this time, the students did not know that they were to be rated. The form also provided space for information concerning length of and intimacy of the friendships. Of the five names listed, four were selected as raters, the choice being made according to length and intimacy of friendship. A printed letter signed by the head of the psychology department was sent to all individuals selected as raters. This letter explained the purpose of the experiment and solicited their cooperation in fill-ing out the personality rating ;report at one of the several periods. designated. On the whole, excellent coopecation was given by the :;itudent raters; of the approximately three hundred who received letters, fewer than twenty failed to respond. For eleven subjects only three ratings were obtained, and four subjects had only two ratings. For the remaining sixty-nine, there were four ratings each. Coopera-tion and interest were also evidenced in the comments made in the space provided on the last page of the report. A large classroom was reserved for the rating. The investigators remained outside the room during the rating period to explain and emphasize to each rater as he arrived the written instructions on the report. Special care was taken to emphasize the confidential treat-ment of all data, the continuous nature of the rating line, and that rating should not be given on items of which the rater was unsure. We feel that the ratings were comparatively accurate because in less than twenty percent of the cases was there a wide disagree-ment among the raters on any item. Results The first step taken in treatment of data was to plot graphically the unaveragcd results of the four ratings. The frequency distribution of each of the four traits was positively skewed, which was to be expected of a distribution of scores obtained from a normal college population. The standard deviation for the traits of Social Adjust-ment and Emotionality showed a lower level of variability than for Health and Family Relations. This was anticipated because the stud-ent raters were less familiar with these last two aspects of person-a.lity. The ratings for each individual were then averaged, and new frequency distributions were constructed. These showed the same positive skew but gave a lower level of variability. Graphs were constructed for each trait of the two tests, men and women separated since on both tests the scoring for men and women is different. These showed less resemblance to a normal curve than did the frequency distributions of the rating scale. Some of the i;:tandard deviations of the Minnesota Scale appeared abnormally large, as shown by the following table. 3Lovell et al.: A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell AdjuPublished by UNI ScholarWorks, 19472!50 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE Table 1 Standard Deviations Minnesota Scale Men Social Adjustment .................................... 22.85 Women 23.4 18 8 28.l Emotionality ................................................... 18 45 Family Relations .......................................... 12.8 Health ····················································-················· [VOL. 54 Bell Inventory Men Women 4.56 6.43 714 7 51 3.36 5.61 3.78 3.46 The technique of statistical, correlation used was the bi-serial correlation. Separate correlations were run for men and women for each trait on both tests. The dichotomous variable was rating scale results, and the continuous variable was test scores. The mean of the averaged rating scale scores for each subject was used as the point of division for determining the dichotomies. The following table give!'! the correlations obtained. Table 2 Biserial Correlations Minnesota Scale Men Social Adjustment ...... -.068 ± .25 Emotionality ......................... 366 ± .22 Family Relations .......... 295 ± .23 Health ................................... . Women .548 ± .13 .067 ± .17 .522 ± .13 Conclusions Bell Inventory Men Women .024 ± .31 -.470 ± .14 .233 ± .28 .008 ± .17 -.183 ± .30 -.378 ± .16 .385 ± .27 -.141 ± .17 As a result of a correlation of scores on the Minnesota Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory with a specially constructed rating scale, we conclude that the correlations of the Minnesota Test with the rating scale results were noticeably higher than those of the Bell Inventory. Of the six correlations for the Minnesota Scale, men and women separately, for Social Adjustment, Emotionality, and family Relations, three were above .300 and a fourth was .295. Two of the higher correlations were above .500. In the case of the Bell Inventory, there were eight correlations,-healtn being independently measured in the Bell, while in the Minnesota, Health was included in Emotionality. Of these correlations, there were only two which were above -.300 (a negative correlation is expected with the scoring of the Bell) with a high of -.470. This would seem to indicate that more of these traits as measured by the Minnesota Personality Scale coincide with student ratings than when measured by the Bell In-ventory. From this we might conclude that for general counseling purposes, the Minnesota Scale would be more helpful in giving a picture of the type of behavior to be expected from students. In calling attention to the lower deviants in a group of students, the Minnesota Scale seems to be more effective than the Bell test. There were eleven students with rating scale scores lower than 1 sigma below the mean for Social Adjustment. Of these eleven stud-4Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, Vol. 54 [1947], No. 1, Art. 38https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol54/iss1/381947] COMPARISON OF TESTS 251 ents, forty-five percent had Minnesota scores in the twenty-fifth per-c::~.ntne or lower, and only twenty-seven percent had Bell scores that are considered "unsatisfactory," or "very unsatisfactory." Of the five students scoring lower than one sigma below the mean on the rating scale for Emotionality, sixty percent scored lower than the twenty-fifth percentile on the Minnesota and forty percent scored "mrnatisfactory" on the Bell. It would seem then that the lower de-viants of the groups, as shown by the rating scale, are more likely to be indicated by the Minnesota Scale than by the Bell Inventory. There was, however, an indication of a lack of consistency within the two tests, for no one personality trait on either test gave high correlations for both men and women. For instance, the trait Emo-tionality gave a correlation for men of .366 while for women it wa~ .067. There was one pattern of similar variation,-that of Social Ad-justment. The correlations on both tests were high for women and low for men. Other than that, there seemed to be no consistency in the difference between men and women. The fact that the group of men was much smaller than the group of women undoubtedly in-fluenced our results. Bibliography Clark, W. A. and Smith, L. F., 1942. Further Evidence on the Validity of Personality Inventories, J. of Educ. Psych. 33, 81. Furfey, P. 1926. An Improved Rating Scale Technique, J. of Educ. Psych. 17, 45-48. Freyd, M. 1923. The Graphic Rating Scale J. of Educ. Psych. 14, 83. Guilford, J. P. Psychometric Methods. McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York. . Stevens, S. N. & Wonderlic, E. F., 1934. An effective revision of the rating scale technique. Person. J., 13, 125-134. GEORGE D. LOVELL, GRINNEI.L Cl)J,LEGE, GRINNELL, row A. 5Lovell et al.: A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell AdjuPublished by UNI ScholarWorks, 1947

A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling

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A Comparison of the Minnesota Personality Scale and the Bell Adjustment Inventory for Student Counseling

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