The Adjective Check List as a Personality Assessment Research Technique

One of the research needs of any psychological enterprise which is concerned with the study and description of human behavior, especially in its interpersonal and interactional aspects, is for a set of descriptive terms which is ( a ) meaningful, (.b) sufficiently complex in scope to cover the ordinary range of behavior observed, and (c ) susceptible of systematic analysis. A conceptual system for the description of personality may easily fall short of meeting one or another of these three criteria. In some instances, neologistic terms have been introduced which run counter to usual language habits, and which require special definitions and rules of transformation (from words previously understood) before they can be utilized. The establishment of new terms and phrases for a small number of central concepts in a theory of behavior may be quite useful, but for the description of first-order events a more immediately meaningful language would seem better. Other conceptual models have been too narrow and delimited in scope to deal with a broad range of human behavior. One of the commonplace criticisms of diagnostic psychiatry, for example, is the assertion that the descriptive variables employed have little applicability except to behavior observed in the hospital and clinic. There are even a few instances on record of a reduction to twoor three-category synopses of behavior. Certain kinds of either-or (or dimensional) distinctions may certainly be worth making (e.g., male-female, integrate-disintegrate, internalizer-externalizer), but a descriptive system which is limited to such points of reference is too restricted to be used as a general tool in personality assessment. It is relatively easy to tell when a descriptive language fails to meet the first two criteria (immediate meaningfulness and adequate scope), but deficienties under the third criterion are less readily ascertained. The problem here is that even remote and nebulous observational reactions to behavior can be ordered and systematized to some degree by means of scaling and sorting techniques. It is probably true, in fact, that any mode of response to psychological