Sloan more useful

[TickTock]

Sloan is more excepted in 'real' science. Does this mean it is a better tool for understanding people?

 

[redacted]

Well, if you want to blindly accept everything you read, then the answer is yes.

Otherwise, don't ask us. Try it out. Come to the conclusion yourself.

I personally find that SLOAN doesn't really do much, since it basically draws no inferences about interaction between the five spectrums. They're just labels, essentially. I, for one, can't build up any kind of meaningful framework out of those labels, but I haven't really tried that hard, so who knows?

 

[FDG]

The SLOAN mit school of management? Or is it something else?

 

[TickTock]

Well, if you want to blindly accept everything you read, then the answer is yes.

I don't that's why I'm appealing to some very well informed minds on this forum.

Come to the conclusion yourself.

In due time.

I personally find that SLOAN doesn't really do much, since it basically draws no inferences about interaction between the five spectrums. They're just labels, essentially. I, for one, can't build up any kind of meaningful framework out of those labels, but I haven't really tried that hard, so who knows?

O.k. Thanks.

 

[TickTock]

The SLOAN mit school of management? Or is it something else?

The 'big five' personality typing system that psychologists use.

Here's some Wiki:

Big Five personality traits - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Jeffster]

I don't find it useful at all.

 

[edcoaching]

Hre's one take on it.

The 5PF...4 of them correlate strongly with the 4 MBTI preference dichotomies. The fifth is about neuroses and the "real" MBTI has nothing in it to diagnose psychiatric conditions so I for one wouldn't want to see any correlations!!! They used factor analysis to develop it; factor analysis was also used on the MBTI to see if the items correctly correlated with the 4 scales and they do.

I haven't seen any studies on whether people agree more with their 5PF results, but either way, both are instruments. It's the applications that count and from what I've seen, there aren't as many, or as deep a set of applications, for the 5PF.

And in teams, I wouldn't go near an instrument that actually identifies someone as more or less troubled--people usually are all too ready to label each other if they haven't already! So I wouldn't go near it for those kinds of applications...

 

[mlittrell]

I find that MBTI used WITH the Enneagram is the most fluid and efficient system.

 

[Eric B]

Actually, an updated version of MBTI called the "Type Differentiation Indicator" does add a new dichotomy of "Comfort-Discomfort" to match Neuroticism. There were originally subscales for this as well as the other four factors in the factor analyses, but Neuroticism was deemed too negative, and then dropped (and then the subscale format also stowed, until Step II).

I wonder if systems like FFM as well as Taylor Johnson might be seen as looking more "scientific", because they don't make "types" out of the scores. They just give you the scores of each factor.
The "type" system seems to be what is looked on with suspicion; probably as too easy to potentially make into another "difference" to discriminate on, and then I had heard about times when everyone had their MBTI codes on stickers on their doors or desk, and that is just too "pop-culturistic".

 

[ptgatsby]

Sloan is more excepted in 'real' science. Does this mean it is a better tool for understanding people?

I wouldn't say 'SLOAN' is more accepted anywhere, as far as I know. The Big Five (IPIP/NEO) is.

No, it doesn't help understand people at all. The research done with it is getting there (notably the extraversion and neuroticism parts), but regardless, it's more about finding what people influence, or how our behaviours influence outcomes.

It is better at answering "What personality traits tend to lead to less happy relationships" and "what personality traits tend to make more money", but that's just because it's used for that. I would say that as far as instruments go, both are pretty valid (granted, IMO, the nature of development of the five factor models makes it a better choice for this function). It's the dichtomies and lack of normalization in MBTI that makes it less suitable. It's still used but not nearly as much in academic circles(you can order research from CAPT.)


Eric: I didn't think Step II included the neuroticism scale. I know they did research into it (and I think it was dropped for including in Step III, which is suppose to resolve the J/P issues) but I thought they never released a test that measured it, formally. When did this come out, and is it integrated into any of the major forms being used?

 

[Eric B]

I wouldn't say 'SLOAN' is more accepted anywhere, as far as I know. The Big Five (IPIP/NEO) is.

No, it doesn't help understand people at all. The research done with it is getting there (notably the extraversion and neuroticism parts), but regardless, it's more about finding what people influence, or how our behaviours influence outcomes.

It is better at answering "What personality traits tend to lead to less happy relationships" and "what personality traits tend to make more money", but that's just because it's used for that. I would say that as far as instruments go, both are pretty valid (granted, IMO, the nature of development of the five factor models makes it a better choice for this function). It's the dichtomies and lack of normalization in MBTI that makes it less suitable. It's still used but not nearly as much in academic circles(you can order research from CAPT.)

Eric: I didn't think Step II included the neuroticism scale. I know they did research into it (and I think it was dropped for including in Step III, which is suppose to resolve the J/P issues) but I thought they never released a test that measured it, formally. When did this come out, and is it integrated into any of the major forms being used?

It's not step II (which is the same four dichotomies, broken down into five subscales, as you can see in my signature image). It's another instrument, the Type Differentiation Indicator (Form J) that adds Comfort-Discomfort. It also uses subscales, however.
Someone who knows more about this, and likes both Step II (EAR) and TDI was telling me the history of it. If I got it correctly, it seems Myers, et al. at one point worked with subscales, including those that tied in with C/D, but it was all dropped, among other things, because C/D was seen as too negative. Now, with competition from FFM, they have renewed interest in it.

Information on steps II, III and TDI are here:
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You can also see a factor analysis, here:
http://harvey.psyc.vt.edu/Documents/BessHarveySwartzSIOP2003.pdf

And CPP and CAPT offers the Form J. Otherwise, it is not commonly used outside clinics, I believe: The Forms of the MBTI Instrument - CAPT.org CPP Product Detail - MBTI Type Differentiation Indicator - Form J (C)

Step II wasn't "dropped" for Step III as far as I know. All the variations seem to be offered side by side (you can see them all on the CPP site) depending on what the users want.

Funny you mention "normalization", because I've seen someone criticize Step II for using "normed" data. I would assume that is what you were referring to. I don't know anything about the data collection methods, but from what I understand, that involved some sort of comparison of different people's scores or something? I myself don't know why that would be either a strike for or against an instrument.

BTW, SLOAN appears to be basically the same as the Big Five, with some renaming of a few of the factors. It technically, if not completely would fit into the category of the "Five Factor Model".

Here, BTW, In the course of searching, I found a good sample of the objections raised against typology:

OBJECTIONS TO TYPOLOGIES

The MBTI is not alone in using a typology to represent continuous data. As discussed above, most dichotomies from which typologies are created involve imposing an artificial division on continuous, normally distributed scores. The resulting dichotomy does not accurately reflect the true nature of the underlying trait.

HR staff familiar with the MBTI or other typologies observe that organization members usually respond favorably to the test results because their type "seems right" ("Now I know me!") and they start seeing others in terms of the handy type scheme ("Now I know you!"). This experiential validation often obscures issues related to the typology's departure from usual psychometric practices. Typologies also tend to foreclose on further exploration of personality dimensions because the instrument seems so comprehensive in its explanations.

One additional problem is encountered with typologies. When moving from a simple dichotomy to a two-way typology there is some blurring of the relative contribution of each of the dimensions in shaping the individual's orientation. This loss of information on the magnitude of scale scores becomes even more pronounced when using a four-variable dichotomy as in the case of the MBTI. To illustrate, since the magnitude of scores is not maintained, an ESTP with a very high S tendency is described in exactly the same way as an ESTP with an S score that barely tipped in the S direction because both have the same type, ESTP.

Current Status of Typologies

What is the current status of type approaches to personality? Bolz (1977) related the decline in serious interest among personality researchers in the once-popular personality typologies on the difficulty of finding psychological variables that conform to categorization. Mendelsohn, Weiss, and Feimer (1982), after an extensive review of typological literature, state that "there does not seem to be any typology in personality research that is demonstratably more than a simplifying way of talking about complex, continuous data" (p. 1157). They further caution that typologies are even more tenuous where more than one personality dimension is involved (as is the case with the MBTI). They go on, however, to acknowledge the communications convenience of typologies, but with the following cautions:

This summarizing and simplifying function of typological language is useful and probably unavoidable, but there are attendant dangers: first, that these arbitrary categories are taken to represent genuine divergences in psychological organization, and second, that we tend to regard as step functions what are, in fact, continuous functions. The problem then, is to show that claims of a typology are justified by more than convenience. (p. 1168)
If typologies, including the MBTI and a host of personal style/management style instruments and their related training programs used in HR work (O'Brien, 1983), fail to accurately reflect the underlying psychological attributes, why do they survive, especially in business and industry? They provide communications convenience. They simplify and make accessible to everyone through an easy-to-learn language the complexities of individual personality and some of the mysteries of interpersonal relationships.

"THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR IN HRM PRACTICE: PROCEED WITH CAUTION" Michael Chase, Quincy University

THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR IN HRM PRACTICE:

 

[ptgatsby]

Funny you mention "normalization", because I've seen someone criticize Step II for using "normed" data. I would assume that is what you were referring to. I don't know anything about the data collection methods, but from what I understand, that involved some sort of comparison of different people's scores or something? I myself don't know why that would be either a strike for or against an instrument.

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't aware that they had released a form based on that research. Interesting.

I'm not sure what they were referring to. Normalization for Step II should change the population distribution to a normalized curve - clearly this is not the case (ie: N/S divide is very much not).

Fundamentally they can't really normalize because of the theory behind it. They would have give up the concept that people are "one or the other". That's possibly what was being referred to - that any normalisation would stand in the way of MBTI theory, as it would more or less say that the majority of the population cannot be clearly identified. Kind of breaks down the use of MBTI!

(Sloan is a Big Five model that as far as I can tell, simply played around with. It would need to be validated for me to consider it useful - anyone can write questions for the FFM, it doesn't mean they comform to the original factor analysis - and I don't believe it has been.)

 

[Eric B]

Well, because you can have five subscales for each dichotomy, and each subscale can potentially be "out of preference" (OOPS: Like "Expressive", "Compassionate", "Tender" and "Methodical" for me), then it IS kind of breaking out of the "one or the other" mold. So yes, from what I was told, this was based on some sort of curve or something like that, and that's what the criticism was about.

 

[edcoaching]

Step III, based on Form J, will be out next year from CAPT: Training, Books, Research for MBTI, Archetypes, Leadership, Psychological Type.. They're still trying to figure out who will be able to purchase it as it shows type development and is meant for counseling.

Myers developed the interpretation of results through intercorrelating up to 20 test items from Form J and seeing if predictions bore out. A few I heard about in a presentation were her 90% accurate predictions on who would drop out of college, die within 10 years of finishing med school, etc. Therapists are supposed to be able to use it to help clients target developmental needs that really cause problems...

Sloan vx. Big 5 vs. MBTI...all the instruments do is tell you what you are. In the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, they're all bad. If the trainer/counselor/whatever uses them well, then it doesn't matter which instrument is used...

 

[FFF]

I like this book even though it's based on the work places and done by an I/O psychologist. There is a lot of useful information in there and there are sections that talk about the interaction of various personality traits and what they are useful for in the work place.

E- O+ N- C- and A+ (accommodating INTPs would be the closest MBTI counterpart) people are good at or have the potential to be good at three things:

Managing by systems

Analytical ability

Accepting diversity

I just remember those cause they apply to me.