Consequences of adding context in personality assessment

Contextualized personality inventories and situational judgement tests (SJTs) display relatively high predictive validity for context-specific outcomes. However, their effectiveness can vary significantly depending on the degree of contextualization and the development method used. For personality inventories, gains in predictive validity tend to be lowest for instructional contextualization, higher for tagged contextualization, and highest for full contextualization. Moreover, test–taker reactions seem most favorable to fully contextualized inventories. However, the benefits of contextualization might vary across personality traits. Unlike traditionally developed SJTs, construct-driven SJTs can also measure specific personality traits, making them fully contextualized personality assessments. This approach opens new avenues for investigating the interplay between situations and personality. Moreover, construct-driven SJTs offer multiple advantages over traditional SJTs, including higher internal consistency, higher construct validity, and broader applicability.