Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemCulturally different and successful?: case studies of gifted Vietnamese secondary students( 1993-01)There is concern in the literature that gifted children from ‘culturally different’ populations, such as Hispanics and Blacks, are underrepresented in special programs due, in part, to the often insensitive traditional methods of identification used that do not detect particular abilities that are valued and promoted within that particular culture. Contrary to these findings, studies indicate that gifted Asians are in profusion. They present themselves as excellent, motivated students and it is almost expected that they will achieve highly in the areas of mathematics and science. The focus of this paper is a study of seven highly capable secondary school boys of Vietnamese background. In several of these cases the children have had huge hurdles to overcome including the death of a mother, escape by boat, life in a refugee camp, parents whose skills are not being utilised as well as being ‘different’. Despite this they have been successful. A case study approach was adopted to look at the nature of these students, the role of the parents and the attitudes towards giftedness. The aim is to present a holistic view of the child rather than obscure their unique characteristics in a muddle of statistics of a large scale study. This paper takes the position that it is dangerous to make such generalisations and that although gifted from the same cultural group will have certain similar traits, the assumption that common values will automatically apply to them should be curtailed as the particular circumstances of the individual child leads to different manifestations in each.
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ItemPsychometric properties of the Myers-Briggs type indicator( 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.