True Colors: Carolyn Kalil’s Personality Assessment

Calm, happy, complex, practical, spontaneous – these are a few ways to describe one’s personality. Everyone has several different pieces to their personality, almost as a puzzle has many pieces that make up one big picture. Throughout time many individuals have come up with their own methods to analyze one’s personality. This essay will describe my understanding of Carolyn Kalil’s True Colors personality assessment and present evidence to support its accuracy. Kalil’s personality assessment has four possible outcomes. After taking the assessment one will be given a color; blue, green, gold, or orange.

Each color resembles a different personality type. Some examples are calm, curious, organized, and active, respectively. After taking this assessment I found out that my personality is blue, which fits me. I prefer calm, harmonious relationships, working in groups, helping and nurturing others, along with well though decision making. The assessment asks a series of “would you rather” style questions. One of the questions, for example, is “When in a relationship I (a) prefer my partner to know that I love them without telling them, (b) tell my partner that I love them. After the assessment your results are generated with some information about your color. For best results, one must be truthful when answering the questions. Some people lack personality ethic, which is when one pretends to be likeable rather than showing their true colors (Lamberton, Minor&, 2010). Lacking personality ethic may give false results, such as how you want to be rather than how you really are. I was a little shocked at the accuracy of the results. This pushed me to dig deeper to find more information on Kalil’s strategy.

Carolyn Kalil’s study used analysis and interpretation, a common method in creating and evaluation surveys. She gathered her information and then assigned meaning to it which helped her to determine conclusions and give her findings significance. Her independent variables were the personality types listed above. Her depended variables were “: 1) Feeling, Thinking, Judging, and Perceiving from the MBTI, 2) the General Occupational Themes of Social, Investigative, Conventional, and Realistic from the SII, and 3) the Orientation Scales of Helping, Analyzing, Organizing, Producing, and Adventuring dimensions of the CISS. (Kalil, 1998). Instrumentation Carolyn Kalil used two instruments when developing her True Colors personality assessment. These instruments were character cards and words clusters. The character cards consisted of an individual ranking four cards, each of which represents one of the four personality types (Krathwohl, 1998). This test appeals more to the blue and gold personalities. The word clusters required the individual to rank a list of adjectives one a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being most like the individual and 1 being least like them (Krathwohl, 1998).

Obviously, this test was self-scored. This test appeals more to the green and orange personalities. Result Kalil operated on the principal of convergent validity. This means that her assessments are related to what they should, in theory, be related to (Lowry, 1990). An example of this would be similarities among test scores. This is because one assumes if you’re taking a test then you should have certain knowledge for that subject, resulting in a high test score.

Although the subjects for both instruments were male and female, no gender differences were found in Kalil’s studies, (other personality assessments such as the Strong Interest Inventory or the Campbell Interest Skill and Survey did, however, show strong differences between genders) concluding that gender does not affect personality types (Lowry, 1990). Kalil found that personality types do change over time and may be influenced by outside factors such as the environment in which they are testing or their current mood (Kalil, 1998).