Question
Explain behavioural rating used in assessment of personality.
Solution
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.
