Explain behavioural rating used in assessment of personality.

Behavioural rating refers to the degree of agreement or disagreement of the rater on a particular issue on three or five point scale.

• Ratings are used in education and industrial setting.
• These are taken from people who know each other intimately and have interacted with them.
• It attempts to put individuals into categories in terms of their behavioural qualities.

Limitations of Behavioural Rating:

(i) Raters display a bias that influences their judgments of different traits.

Example: The single favourable or unfavourable trait forms the basis of a rater's overall judgment of a person. This process is called the Halo Effect.

(ii) Raters have a tendency to put individuals in the middle of the scale, i.e., Middle Category Bias or in the extreme position, i.e., Extreme category bias.

The limitations can be overcome by either

• Appropriate training of the rater, or
• Developing scales with minimum biases.