Content Validity of an Objective Personality Test for Assessing the Achievement Motive

For a long time, researchers measuring the achievement motive have relied on two families of tools: projective methods and self-report questionnaires. This study looks somewhere else. It examines Work Style, a test built on Cattell's idea of objective personality testing and carried over into the study of achievement motivation.

Two tasks sit at the center of the work. The first, Coding Symbols (CS), asks the test-taker to set a goal. The second, Figure Discrimination (FD), is an endurance task. Both are read against the theory of the achievement motive, with the aim of judging whether each one genuinely draws that motive out of the person taking it.

Data came from samples gathered in two settings that differ in what pushes a person to perform. One was a selection situation, where something was at stake. The other was voluntary participation in research, where it was not. The hypotheses were written to ask a plain question: do these tasks actually activate the achievement motive, and does that activation show up differently depending on the setting?

The Coding Symbols task holds up. As it stands, it does evoke the achievement motive, and that is the condition that has to be met before anyone can build content-valid variables for an objective personality test from it. Early signs pointing toward the construct validity of the variables pulled from this task look encouraging.

Figure Discrimination does not fare as well. The way the task is structured does not lend itself to deriving valid variables for the objective test, so its content validity cannot be established here.