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Life Story Interview Outscores Personality Tests The Life Story Interview, developed as a research tool by professor of human development and social policy Dan McAdams, was recognized recently in the popular press as a better alternative to personality tests. According to the Boston Globe on February 13, the Life Story Interview “offers a way of understanding your personality that is a lot more meaningful than a test.” The interview incorporates a series of probing questions to elicit in-depth responses about the major episodes in a person's life. Sections cover life chapters, critical events, life challenge, influences on the life story, stories and the life story, alternative futures for the life story, personal ideology, and life theme. Newsweek magazine mentioned McAdams' work in its February 21 issue. McAdams questions the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, which is used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. “It has vastly oversimplified personality, making it sound like people are walking ‘types.’ Most people are blends,” McAdams is quoted as saying. McAdams favors a life story approach to human identity, and his research employs qualitative research tools to elicit significant information. He considers the Life Story Interview a good supplement to, rather than a complete replacement for, traditional personality tests, which provide useful information but don’t go far enough, he says. “They give you what I call a ‘psychology of the stranger’ — a first read on a person. As you get to know a person better, however, you learn much that goes well beyond what these simple tests can tell,” he says. “The person’s life story provides depth, color and meaning to personality — life stories complement broad trait attributions by spelling out in detail people’s narrative understandings of who they believe they are, who they were and who they hope to become in the future.” The Life Story Interview tool is accessible on the site for the Foley Center at www.sesp.northwestern.edu/foley/instruments/interview. The School of Education and Social Policy's Foley Center for the Study of Lives, funded by a grant from the Foley Foundation of Milwaukee, is an interdisciplinary research project committed to studying psychological and social development in the adult years. by Marilyn Sherman Updated March 3, 2005  E-mail this story
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