California Psychological Inventory (CPI)
The California Psychological Inventory (CPI) is a widely recognized paper-and-pencil personality assessment tool designed to evaluate normal adult personality traits in various contexts, including personal and professional settings. Developed by Harrison Gough in the late 1940s and first published in 1957, the CPI consists of a long-form version with 462 statements and a shorter version with 260 statements, both requiring respondents to answer true or false. The test assesses twenty distinct personality characteristics, such as sociability, independence, and responsibility, and generates scores based on comparisons with a nationwide norm group.
While the CPI is praised for its robust validation and empirical foundation, it has faced criticism for overlapping scales and potential cultural bias, particularly when applied to diverse populations. The CPI's structural scales provide an efficient overview of personality traits without sacrificing detailed analysis, making it popular among professionals in organizational psychology for applications in hiring, coaching, and leadership development. Despite its limitations, the CPI continues to be a valuable tool for understanding personality in the context of normal functioning individuals.
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California Psychological Inventory (CPI)
- DATE: 1957 forward
- TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality
SIGNIFICANCE: The California Psychological Inventory is a paper-and-pencil personality test used to assess normal people in terms of a wide range of personality characteristics. Although the test has been criticized for overlap among subscales and cultural bias, it is considered among the best validated and most useful of such tests.
Introduction
The California Psychological Inventory (CPI) is a test designed for a comprehensive analysis of traits that describe a normal adult personality in a personal and professional context. The long-form version of the test (CPI 434) consists of 462 statements about feelings and opinions, ethical and social attitudes, personal relationships, and characteristic behavior. The testee responds to each item as true or false. Responses to these statements are analyzed according to how well they fit twenty different patterns, each of which corresponds to a specified personality characteristic—sociability, dominance, independence, responsibility, self-control, tolerance, and achievement. The individual test taker’s scores on each scale are evaluated by how these scores compare with the range of scores established by a nationwide comparison group or norm group. Such comparisons permit an evaluation of the test taker on three structural scales that summarize patterns underlying the twenty primary scales at a more abstract and basic level. Externality-internality is defined as self-confident, assertive extraversion, versus introversion. Norm-favoring versus norm-questioning is defined as the allegiance to the conventional social rules versus its lack, and the degree of one’s “realization” of these tendencies are defined as an index of self-fulfillment or satisfaction. Three reports are generated to describe results, including a profile, a narrative, and an analysis. The CPI 434 is designed to be administered by a professional in personality theory and assessment methodology, such as an industrial-organizational psychologist.
The short-form version (CPI 260) is a 260 true or false question assessment that may be used in the workplace for coaching, human resources activities, organizational development, and more. It can be administered and scored by a member of an organization who follows instructions that accompany the assessment, making it a more affordable and flexible option. The results are generated in a client feedback summary and a coaching report for leaders. Like the long-form version, CPI 260 measures self-management skills, leadership, motivation, and other work-related personality factors.
Development
Harrison Gough (1921–2014), the author of the CPI, began assembling items relevant to the measurement of everyday personality characteristics in the late 1940s. It was 1957, however, before the completed eighteen scales of the CPI were published by Consulting Psychologist Press. In 1987, modest revisions in the scale were initiated. At this time, a few items were modified to reflect cultural changes, and two primary scales, independence and empathy, were added to the original eighteen. The most important change, however, was the addition of the three summary structural scales.
Two important principles governed the CPI’s development. The first of these was Gough’s interest in measuring “folk concepts,” characteristics, which, in many cultures and over centuries, made sense to ordinary people. This principle was in contrast to many existing tests that assessed concepts based on psychiatric diagnosis or academic personality theories or were abstracted from a mathematical procedure called factor analysis.
A second guiding principle was that of empirical criterion keying, which means that the validity items on scales, as well as the scales themselves, should be established by actual research. In such research, items, and scales are tested to ensure that people who show evident differences in real-life functioning answer the item or the scale in the different ways one would expect. For example, the socialization scale was conceived to measure moral uprightness in the sense of observing society’s rules and customs. One would expect that individuals convicted of violent crimes would answer questions on this scale in ways different from Eagle Scouts and would likely score much lower on this scale. Research verifying this difference supported the validity of the item and the scale. Hundreds of such predictions derived from the meaning of various CPI scales were tested. Only thereafter was the test considered valid.
Evaluation
A major criticism of the CPI is that there is much overlap between highly similar scales. Dominance and capacity for status, for example, seem to involve only slightly nuanced measurements of almost the same thing. It has been argued, therefore, that the essential information could be gleaned from fewer, simpler scales. Gough answered this criticism by pointing out that everyday descriptions of others by ordinary folk also show this sort of overlap. He also pointed out that the structural scales, added in 1987, permit such a simple, efficient description of a personality without depriving the test-taker of the refined and detailed analysis offered by assessing twenty primary traits.
It has also been charged that the CPI is often employed beyond the uses for which its validity has been established. Clinicians are prone to apply the test to abnormal populations for which validity data is incomplete. The test has also been frequently used for people from cultures outside the United States and minority groups. Although Gough selected his “folk concepts” for their apparent cross-cultural relevance, validity studies in some minority groups have been neglected. Interpreting the test results of those from different cultural backgrounds must, therefore, be done with caution, particularly when used in hiring decisions.
These admitted limitations could be addressed by adding more studies of minority or clinical populations to the already impressive research with this instrument. For more than half a century, the CPI has served such purposes as predicting vocational choice, academic success, and antisocial behavior, and is sometimes administered by employers to prospective employees to determine their suitability for the position. Its many scales permit a detailed description of a person in a language that is easy to understand. The CPI remains one of the most commonly used personality tests for normal populations.
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