Help me conate regarding this personality profiling instrument

December 26, 2006 4:27 PM

Does anybody know anything about the 'Kolbe Index' personality classification system?

I've been poking around, and haven't found much that sheds a lot of light on it. Katherine Kolbe, developer of the system, has apparently written a book on it which is available on Amazon, but my curiosity at this point doesn't include spending money, just time. Kolbe sells evaluations based on her system. They also cite some supporting studies which look mighty unimpressive to me.

What it looks like to me is something like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (basically an MBTI derivative), with different terminology and really crappy information design. Anybody have actual experience applying this instrument, studying it, or having it applied to them?

I'm asking about this because my employer is having all of us execute this instrument via a web form. After I and my fiancé spent some time researching it, we decided the results for me were more or less accurate - but the web-based materials that Kolbe's company provides seem to be telling me that this instrument tests something called "unchanging instinct", which lights up warning bells in my skull. I don't really have any fear of the results being misapplied; I'm just really curious about it, and kind of appalled by what I've seen of it so far.

posted by lodurr to society & culture (3 comments total)

Have you asked at your public library for Kolbe's book?
posted by Carol Anne at 6:57 AM on December 27, 2006

My company bought a bunch of evaluations and I took mine a couple of weeks ago.

I thought it was pretty interesting in what it said about my work methodology and I can definitely see some corrolation in the part about what type of work styles work for me.

I think my employer just made us take it because it was interesting and not to make enterprise-wide decisions about which people should be working together or not.

However, I also see some corrolation between what my horoscope says sometimes and I am absolutely not an astrology person and don't make decisions based on my horoscope. Its fun to look at for 2 seconds and then its forgotten about.

What was appalling about it? The 'unchanging' part?
posted by kookywon at 9:22 AM on December 27, 2006

The "instinct" part was one part. That's not testable.

The other part was the information design of the report. I stared at it for five minutes and couldn't be remotely sure that I knew what it was trying to tell me. My fiance found a diagram in Kolbe's book that was more detailed, and I dug up some documentation on the terminology Kolbe uses, and was able to decipher it, but the report itself does not include the information required to understand it, and the background information is not available on their website.

I say that I can understand the report, now, but that doesn't mean that I think they could fix the information design with better labelling and documentation. It's a terrible presentation -- it commits the sin they're trying to obviate by a) using a bar graph to represent position on a continuum, and b) using vertical placement when they're ostensibly trying to avoid value judgements.

Here's why that bothers me: These are pretty basic things, and if they can design their information presentation this badly, I'm suspicious about their ability to actually understand their own field.
posted by lodurr at 6:50 AM on December 29, 2006