Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses

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Psychometric properties of the Myers-Briggs type indicator

Scott, Graham Douglas ( 1999)

The Myers-Briggs type indicator is an extremely popular psychological instrument. Despite years of development, and much research, the psychometric properties of the instrument have not been definitely agreed upon. Two issues attract attention; that of categorisation associated with the concept of type, and the issue of what exactly the instrument measures. Previous factor analytical studies produced various results. Data from 309 psychology students from the University of Melbourne were used to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis, and a latent trait analysis. The confirmatory factor analysis was a good fit to the data, and confirmed that with the exception of two items, the 56 items tested fitted the expected four factor structure of the Myers-Briggs type indicator. A latent trait/latent class analysis showed that at least three (the extraversion-introversion, thinking-feeling and judgement-perception) of the four subscales were best conceptualised as a normally distributed latent trait. This finding is in agreement with some previous studies. These have suggested that the scoring and categorical interpretation of the Myers-Briggs type indicator may not be the optimal method for utilisation of the instrument.