California Psychological Inventory
The California Psychological Inventory (CPI) is a personality assessment which was developed in America has been studied extensively and been utilised internationally for decades.
The CPI was developed by Harrison Gough Ph.d. and its purpose was to provide the interpreter a true to life and useful picture of the person taking the test. The results should be recognisable by friends and others, who know the individual and they should be able to predict future behaviour.
The CPI has been revised several times to keep up to date and requires a high level of experience and qualifications to interpret competently, due to its complexity.
As a restricted tool it is only available to those with advanced psychological training such as the Registered Psychologists at Niche.
At the same time the language used in the interpretations and manual are both cross-culturally significant and should be intuitively easy to understand for psychologists and non-psychologists.
Advantages of the California Psychological Inventory:
The California Psychological Inventory (CPI) is designed to give a measure of the way others would describe the person taking the test, not how they would describe themselves.
It has low “face validity” meaning, it is harder to “fake” than most personality assessments. Read more about faking
If the CPI is “faked” by a candidate then the individual is asked to re-sit the questionnaire and be more candid in their responding.
It is a normative measure of personality, not ipsative, which is better for recruitment assessment.
It has a measure of a person’s realisation or satisfaction with their life situation which can impact on their behaviour and motivation at work and home.
While normative it has a True/False questionnaire format, meaning it is not possible to take the middle answer to hide one’s preferences.
We have developed extensive NZ norms for this tool broken into different occupational groups and levels.
The individual’s results (blue line) are shown graphically against both a general population norm (the 50th T score) and an appropriate business norm (finance manager - red line shown below). Being able to see graphically where a candidates result fall compared to their peers can be useful and enlightening.
Test Review of the CPI
Buros Institute of Mental Measurement does a peer review of assessments where the scientific rigor of test development is reviewed, this is where experts “test” the test makers.
“Over the nearly five decades since the creation of the CPI, an extensive body of research has formed that examines its performance in diverse assessment populations and age groups. This body of knowledge provides a wealth of comparative reference materials."
"The CPI provides a substantiated method to aid in the consensual description of differences between individuals and groups across many substantiated dimensions of personality. Since its inception, the CPI has been quite successful in its groundbreaking attempt to describe a broad array of fairly robust personality characteristics across a wide cross section of society.”
The CPI comes in two different versions as outlined below:
CPI 434 Overview
- 434 true/false items
- Untimed and takes approximately 45-60 minutes to complete
- 20 Primary scales
- 3 Folk scales; 7 Special scales
- Measures of “fake good”, “fake bad” and internal consistency
- Provides a very in-depth and robust picture of the individual’s preferences
- The profile needs to be interpreted as a whole due to the scales having some overlap and impact on each of the others’ interpretations
CPI 260 Overview
- 260 true/false items
- Untimed and takes approximately 45-60 minutes to complete
- 20 Primary scales
- 3 Folk scales; 6 Special scales
- Measures of “fake good”, “fake bad” and internal consistency
- Provides a very in-depth and robust picture of the individual’s preferences
- The profile needs to be interpreted as a whole due to the scales having some overlap and impact on each of the others’ interpretations