Science Projects on Personality Types
The history of scientific personality testing starts in 1917 with the Personal Data Sheet, which Robert Woodworth developed to attempt to predict which soldiers were most vulnerable to PTSD. Psychologists have designed many more personality tests since then. Any science project on personality is going to involve administering at least one personality test.
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Ethics and Test Selection
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According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the first consideration in planning a project with human subjects is that the test takers must all be volunteers, free of any coercion and free to withdraw at any time. Do not have teachers or anyone else pressure people to take your test or to continue if they want to stop. Review ethics rules before you begin. A section on your ethics review should begin your project report.
You will not be able to obtain official versions of the scientific tests, for financial and other reasons. Select carefully from free tests based on reputable tests. The Myers-Briggs Instrument is one possibility. One good source for a Myers-Briggs based test is the book "Please Understand Me" by Keirsey and Bates.
Do not use any test designed to identify mental illnesses or disorders, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, because of the ethical concerns; a perceived diagnosis could harm a subject.
Background Research
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Find reputable sources and read about tests you might use. Personality tests designed to guide career choices are reasonably ethically safe and have many versions available online.
Learn about psychology concepts like validity, reliability and statistical significance. You will probably use one or all of these in your project. Recruit more than 35 people to take your test. If you can't get that many, learn the reason and then explain why the size of your sample has statistical problems and what errors that can cause.
Your Experiment
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Validity means how well your test measures or predicts what it's designed to do. You might test validity of a career test by giving your subjects a list of potential careers and asking them to rate their preferences. Afterward, have them take the personality test and compare the career choice predictions to their preferences. Define in advance what you will count as the test being correct, such as whether a subject's top three choices fall within the test's predictions. Graph your results and calculate the validity of the test.
One kind of reliability is how well the test does at giving the same results for the same person when it's administered more than once. If you can arrange the time, you could test the same subjects two months apart and calculate how consistent the test results are. You will need to research and explain how consistent people's real personality traits are over time.
You might also obtain several different tests based on the same official test. Administer each test to the same group of people to see how reliable each test is relative to the other tests. Construct hypotheses to explain the differences. Scientists often end their analysis of an experiment with new hypotheses to suggest directions for future research.
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