How personality assessments work to predict tenant behavior
Under the hood
Personality is a pattern of behavior. When you know how someone typically behaves, you can make an excellent prediction on how they are likely to behave in the future. Personality assessments use scientific methods to gather information on how someone typically behaves.
What do items look like?Items ask people whether or not a statement is descriptive of themselves. Responses are made on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Example: I often forget to put things back in their proper place.
How are items developed?
There is an entire field of science devoted to test construction techniques. We use current best practices to develop our assessments. Generally, the process is as follows:
- Start with definitions of personality traits that have been linked to important tenant behaviors.
- Develop a large item pool for each trait.
- Have experts rate each item on several key characteristics (e.g., desirability, face validity, wording quality).
- Administer items to a large sample of tenants.
- Choose items based on a number of criteria. Choices must balance expert ratings with how well items predicted behavior while minimizing adverse impact.
- Validate the refined assessment on a fresh sample.
- Continually revise and improve the assessments as data becomes available over time.