Situational Judgment Tests as an Alternative Measure for Personality Assessment

Abstract. Across many domains of applied psychology, personality traits are related to important outcomes such as well-being, psychological disorders, work performance, and academic achievement. However, self-reports, the most common approach to personality assessment, have certain limitations and disadvantages, such as being prone to faking. We investigated whether situational judgment tests, an established assessment technique to predict job performance, might serve as an alternative measure for the assessment of personality. Our results show that a situational judgment test specifically developed to assess narrow personality traits may possess high levels of construct validity. Additionally, our results indicate that the situational judgment was equivalent to a self-report personality measure with regard to predicting a number of theoretically related criteria. We conclude that situational judgment tests may serve as an alternative method for the assessment of personality and discuss potential theoretical and applied drawbacks.