![]() The distinction between, yet interdependence of, concept and measurement in the study of personality requires a spiraling interplay of these levels of analysis-concepts should suggest approaches to measurement, and measurement should refine conceptual formulations. These differences may be impractical to study or they may be judged as trivial, but the concept requires that they exist. Personality concepts, if they are not hopelessly vague or inconsistent, always imply specifiable behavioral differences in people. Personality measurements, if they discriminate at all, always express, in a pure or impure form, explicitly or implicitly, a personality concept in terms of which the differential behavior may be understood. In the study of personality, however, there is no escaping an immediate, insistent, incessant preoccupation with the problem of linking concepts and empirical operations. By and large, measuring length by a ruler and weight by a scale does not generate controversy the relation of these concepts to their respective methods of measurement seems obvious and beyond dispute. In the physical sciences and in some subareas of psychology where intuitions are strong and widely held, one need not be acutely concerned with the distinction between a concept and the way in which that concept happens to be measured. The reason for the disappointing disparity between the energies already expended and the accomplishments which may be certified lies in the uncertainty which has surrounded the concept of personality and the naïveté in psychology about the logic and justification of measurement. It may now, because of hard-won recognitions, be ready for significant and cumulative advances. The field of personality measurement, viewed in the perspective of its short but busy history, has progressed in a fumbling, digressive manner. Situational Tests Sebastiano Santostefano ![]() ![]() The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory W.
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