eTest Background and Development

The eTest personality inventory was originally developed as a result of Management Psychology Group (MPG) client requests for an easy-to-administer, accessible, business‑relevant test to help in candidate selection and employee development. The goal was to create a good descriptive measure of normal adult personality, as well as an empirical profile of performance-based scales. At the time of its conception and development, most of the mainstream commercially available psychological assessment measures were more clinically oriented and, although some of them could be adapted for the business environment, there was a need for something that would be more appropriate for candidate and employee assessment for selection and development. The original tool was called the Business Check List (BCL), but has more recently come to be known simply as the eTest Personality Inventory. Since its introduction as a tool to help managers make better selection decisions with entry-level candidates, it has evolved into a general-purpose personality inventory that has proven to be useful for mid-level and executive selection and development purposes.

The eTest battery was developed over a ten-year period as part of a standard test battery for full psychological assessments conducted by the psychologists of Management Psychology Group (MPG). The initial sample for development and validation consisted of over 4,000 subjects in a wide range of jobs and industries. It was one of the very first online testing services. The original version was on a client’s remote sales force management software. It migrated to the web in 1993.

The use of natural language to describe human traits is a cornerstone of personality measurement, first applied by Gordon Allport in 1936. Since then, it has been extensively used and refined in a wide variety of assessment instruments. The ACL (Adjective Checklist, by Harrison Gough, 1983) is an example of this natural language format of assessment. However, since respondents were free to choose the number of items they endorsed as descriptive of them, the scoring, for our purposes, was problematic. Such ipsative instruments, while sometimes useful, do not lend themselves to the type of statistical analysis useful for comparisons of individuals or for traditional validation studies. Also, the ACL had been developed as more of a research tool and was considered to be ideographic (focused on the individual, not developed for comparisons of traits between individuals). As the ACL was developed and refined, it became more slanted towards counseling and clinical uses than towards business and organizational applications, and several of the scales were clearly inappropriate (and illegal) in the emerging regulatory environment.

To preserve the positive and useful advantages of the adjective checklist format and to avoid the problems associated with the ACL, we used adjectives and descriptive phrases but employed a rating scale to indicate a person’s amount of agreement or disagreement that any particular term described him or her. We called this instrument the Business Check List (BCL) to indicate that it was a more business-oriented adjective checklist. It is now more commonly referred to as the eTest Personality Assessment.

The original instrument consisted of 500 adjectives and descriptive phrases. After the initial pilot projects, we eliminated those items that virtually everyone either endorsed or rejected. For instance, the vast majority of normal people endorse the words intelligent and honest when faced with those adjectives as descriptors of themselves on a personality inventory, rendering them useless as discriminators in any meaningful sense. The current instrument consists of 317 items, each of which requires the respondent to indicate how accurately the term describes him or her.

There are three primary sets of scores generated by this instrument. The first group is from a factor analysis that reflects the Personality Profile (the Big Five personality factors). The Job Function Scales were obtained from correlating test results of over 800 people with demographic data about the type of job the person held or for which he/she was a candidate. Finally, the Job Performance Scales were derived by correlating actual managerial ratings of over 5,000 people several months after they had taken the eTest instrument. In addition to the normative scales mentioned above, there are several validity measures that can facilitate the proper interpretation of test profiles.

The full eTest battery consists of a 317-item adjective-checklist-format personality inventory and two cognitive measures. The cognitive measures consist of verbal knowledge (vocabulary) and a general deductive reasoning assessment. These components of the battery are described more fully in the following sections.

The eTest Personality Inventory has been taken by over 150,000 people as part of candidate selection, employee development, personal insight and career planning purposes. It is currently offered as a standard online instrument for selection and development, and it remains a central component of the full psychological assessment process used by the psychologists of Management Psychology Group and other consultants.

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