Leadership By Encouragement

Psychological Fingerprints - "One of a Kind" [Book Review] There are two basic ways to get to know people, one from the outside and the other from the inside. Looking at people's personalities from the outside, we compare each person to someone else to determine how they are the same and how they are different. Most personality assessment tools in psychology take this approach. They ask the respondent to answer a set of questions, and then they compare the answers to those of hundreds or thousands of others to find out which ones they resemble. The respondent is then put into categories based on these similarities. Examples are the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory (MMPI) , the 16PF , the NEO-FFI , and the BASIS-A . We know the value of each approach in the process of science and in particular psychology; however, I am pleased that the authors have been able to integrate both approaches in their book so as to benefit from the clinical as well as the more objective scientific assessments to acquire important knowledge on a person's psychological fingerprint or life-style. From the outside Technically, the approach represented by these examples is called "nomothetic" or "naming." The nomothetic approach could be thought of as having "Rumplestiltskin" assumptions. In the fairy tale, the elf Rumplestiltskin lost his power once he had been named. Likewise, the naming and categorization of flora and fauna by Linnaeus in the early 19th century made it possible for Darwin to remove some of the mystery of the biological sciences. Today, advances in statistics and the capacity for computers to process large numbers of nomothetic observations have made it possible for researchers to draw complex conclusions such as "If you score X, you are Y% more likely to do/have A than someone who scores Z." These conclusions can help to remove the mystery in making predictions about groups of people and in indicating diagnostic categories. They also "look" very scientific in that they may be presented in tables and numbers and pass tests of reliability and validity, just like sciences that are considered more legitimate, such as biology and physics. As compared with the inside approach, however, nomothetic, or "outside," approaches have two shortcomings, one theoretical and one personal. Nomothetic shortcoming #1 The theoretical problem is one that social psychologists and sociologists have pointed out for decades: human behavior is very much influenced by the social field and by one's definition of the situation. No matter who is watching, my dog's behavior when he comes to a fire hydrant is always the same. Needless to say, that is not the case with human beings. Part of the charm of dogs and other pets is that they don't craft their behavior to impress us, or to avoid disgusting us, unless of course a person has trained them to appear to do so. Even less does a rock skip across the water to fulfill the expectations of the person throwing it. But a person might, if she could skip across water. Because human beings survive only by the support of others and come to be fully human only through interaction with others, it is our nature to orient ourselves to our social situation as we perceive it. If we think formality is demanded, we may comply or rebel, but whatever we do is in reference to the situation. To conclude that we know a person when all we know is his answers to questions in a testing situation is to ignore a part of what makes humans human. The fact that nomothetic assessment removes the person being assessed from his social context is a major shortcoming. Nomothetic shortcoming #2 The other shortcoming of the nomothetic approach is that people feel they are not treated personally, as unique individuals. To understand this shortcoming, I ask you to imagine being informed of a score you received on an assessment, say the BASIS-A: "Hello, _______ (fill in your name). You scored in the 95th percentile of the Going Along scale of the BASIS-A." Your first response might be, "What does that mean?" Knowing that, most psychologists do not reveal raw scores to those whom they have assessed. Instead, they interpret the scores, which means that they guess what they mean. Even though these guesses may look very authoritative because they are written up in a "Psychological Report," they are guesses because of the principle stated above: a person's behavior is influenced by her interpretation of the situation. The psychologist who has assessed you knows for sure only the score, not what you meant by your answers. As a result of the score you have received and the guesses made about it by your assessor, you may be given a diagnosis, or recommended for a certain kind of treatment, or told what kind of career fits people "like you." You might respond, "I feel like I'm just a number or a label." Indeed, it was responses like these to nomothetic vocational assessments that prompted Les White and me to develop the Work Style Assessment that appears in the Appendix to this volume. The personal, subjective shortcoming of the nomothetic approach is that individuals are not treated as individuals, as unique as we all think we are. In Chapter 4 of this volume, the authors state, "Each man [sic] is unique, and that is the beauty of the individual." (p. ?) KENDALL HUNT-INSERT CORRECT PAGE NUMBER. We know that we are like others in some ways, but we feel disrespected, or even violated, when our uniqueness is ignored. From the inside The other way to get to know people is from the inside. This book offers several assessment approaches which avoid both shortcomings of the nomothetic approach. Life Style assessment is based on this approach to getting to know people, one that is technically called "idiographic," as in one's "unique idiom." In this approach, the assumption is made that each person has a unique history and perspective, a unique fingerprint. Each of us is recognized as one of a kind. Because the principle of idiography, or uniqueness, is a basic assumption in the philosophy of Alfred Adler, it is little wonder that this book is based on Adlerian psychology. Indeed, another name for Adlerian psychology is "Individual Psychology" in English. The English translation "individual" misses the connotation that Adler intended in German: psychology of the whole, integrated, and unique person. Many psychologists have been willing to pay the price of the nomothetic approach in order to gain scientific legitimacy. Gathering and analyzing quantitative data requires us to ignore context, unique history and subjective perspective. During much of the past century, this was not considered too high a price in psychology because the dominant trends were psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Psychoanalysis was interested in intrapsychic phenomena, in the conflicts inside a person, so social context was irrelevant. Behaviorism did take into account one's environmental history, but this was a mechanistic, stimulus-response approach that ignored subjectivity. Neither insisted on including both context and subjectivity. In assuming that social embeddedness and subjective creativity account for individual uniqueness, along with holism and goal-directedness, Adlerian psychology joined with social psychology in representing an alternative to the dual hegemony of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. As we enter a new millennium, cognitive psychology has begun to appreciate the need to study context, history and emotions, in addition to "pure" thinking. And social constructivists have begun to recognize how people co-create their reality. In effect, mainstream clinical psychology is catching up with an Adlerian perspective in insisting on a contextualized, embodied, subjective perspective. However, there still remains the argument that nomothetic assessments are the only ones that are truly scientific. If the only way to assess from the inside was an informal conversation, then this argument might have merit. Does the very subjective bias that makes each of us unique also make it impossible to validate an idiographic assessment? A long history of the development of idiographic, or qualitative, methods yields the answer "No," although we must look outside mainstream psychology for most of that history. In my own studies in anthropology and sociology, an idiographic approach was necessary. Cultural anthropologists who wanted to understand a society that had been isolated from Western contact could not give the society a questionnaire-they could not even speak the language of the people they wanted to work with. So they let the people be their teacher. For example, their ability to get a drink of water when they asked for it in the indigenous language was proof of their being able to understand and use the language. An approach called "ethnomethodology" was what anthropologists used to discover the uniqueness of new (to them) societies. I submit that Adler's approach to understanding personality, the Life Style Assessment which Eckstein and Kern have presented in many of its variations, is like an ethnomethodology of an individual. We could call it "psychomethodology." The idiographic approach this represents may seem unusual in a narrow psychological context, but in the wider context of all the social sciences, it is at home as part of a long and rich tradition. Psychomethodology Like ethnomethodology and other qualitative approaches, psychomethodology does have methods for controlling for bias on the part of the researcher or assessor. Two major ones are triangulation and iteration (or reflexivityxi). In learning a new language where there are no dictionaries and no translators, an ethnomethodologist seeks several sources of information. He checks what one informant tells him against what he observes and the checks that against what another informant reports. Using a metaphor from surveying, this is a check on one's observations which qualitative researchers have called "triangulation." If different perspectives yield pretty much the same information, the ethnomethodologist can be more certain that his observations are reliable.       Likewise, the psychomethodologist, using one of the assessment methods presented in this volume, collects a overlapping data, such as a description of a client's siblings as well as a rating of the children in a family on traits such as "intelligence" and "rebellious." These are two different ways of asking for the same information. If those two data points support each other, then the assessor can better rely on their accuracy. When I teach Life Style Assessment, I suggest that students look for at least two different points of convergence before guessing at the patterns of a client's Life Style. For example, if the client describes her older brother as "a bookworm" and also rates him as highest on "intelligence," these two bits of information support the observation that the client saw her brother as the smart one in the family constellation. "Iteration," or "reflexivity" has to do with trying one's conclusions in real life. An ethnomethodologist cannot be sure her knowledge of a new language is acceptable until she can carry on a conversation with native speakers and be understood. If she asks, "May I have a drink of water?" and a native speaker gives her a handful of straw, she knows at least some of her conclusions about the language are invalid. A psychomethodologist uses a similar validation technique when she guesses, "Your older brother was the smart one, so you specialized in being sociable." This remains a guess until the client affirms, "Yes, that's right." This is in keeping with the Adlerian assumption of equality, that the client is the expert on her life. Only after iteration, or feeding back of information and getting assent, does the psychomethodologist conclude that she understands a part of how the client trained herself to approach life-that is, her Life Style. Iteration, or back-and-forth checking, is necessary because each of us is one of a kind. Each of us, in a sense, speaks a private language full of meanings that only we know. The methods of anthropology and sociology, developed to understand unique social patterns, are crucial if we want to get to know someone from the inside in their one-of-a-kind uniqueness. Both and...       I believe that idiographic methods are crucial to a full and respectful assessment of individuals-or couples, families, or groups, for that matter. But I am not presenting an either-or argument. Nomothetic assessment recognizes another truth about human beings-that we are alike in many ways, and that we are like some others in some ways. The sophistication of statistical techniques in analyzing quantitative data represents a significant contribution. The BASIS-A described in this volume by one of its developers, Roy Kern, is a nomothetic assessment tool based on Adlerian theory. When scores from the BASIS-A correspond with idiographic interpretations made as part of a more traditional Life Style assessment, we can better rely on those interpretations. The BASIS-A can lend triangulated evidence to our conclusions. Thus, the most effective approach to assessment combines the strengths of both nomothetic and idiographic tools. I commend the coauthors of this work for including both kinds of assessment tools. In their selection and their writing, they demonstrate breadth and balance. I particularly appreciate their encouragement of new applications of Life Style Assessment. The Work Style Assessment (see Appendix) is an example of an application designed specifically to be used in workplace and career-oriented settings. It is my hope that readers of this book will seek other ways to apply the tools presented in these pages and to make their own unique contributions to the development of Life Style assessment. Karl Marx said, "Philosophers merely interpret the world. The point, however, is to change it." Clinical psychology, counseling, social work, and Adlerians following the predilection of Alfred Adler help people overcome suffering and live their lives more fully. In addition to the assessment tools presented in these pages to help professionals understand people, I am pleased that the coauthors conclude with a chapter on "Reorientation," or how to use that understanding to facilitate positive change. I have relied on previous versions of this work for many years in teaching Adlerian psychology and assessment. I welcome this completely revised and integrated volume as a much-needed contribution to understanding people and to helping them change. Dr. Linda Page President Adlerian School of Professional Psychology Toronto Hathaway, S. R., and McKinley, J. C. (1989). Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2): Manual for Administration and Scoring. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, Inc. (1991). Administrator's manual for the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF). Champaign, IL: Author. Costa, Jr., P.T. , and McCrae, R. R. (1992). NEO PI-R professional manual: Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Odessa, Fl: Curlette, W.S., Wheeler, M.S., and Kern, R. M. (1997). BASIS-A Inventory technical manual. Highlands, N.C.: Mahoney, M. J., and Gabriel, T. J. (1987). Psychotherapy and cognitive sciences: An evolving alliance. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 1, 39-60. Maines, D. R. (2000). The social construction of meaning. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 29, 577-584. Watts, R. E. (2000). 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