Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Trait Approach
Option (1) Type Approach — Incorrect. Type approaches try to understand personality by examining broad patterns of behaviour and placing each person in one type, such as Jung’s introverts and extraverts. The 16PF does not sort people into types.
Option (2) Trait Approach — Correct. The trait approach focuses on the specific psychological attributes along which people differ in consistent and stable ways. Raymond Cattell, a trait theorist, used factor analysis to find 16 primary or source traits, and developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) to assess personality on them.
Option (3) Behavioural Approach — Incorrect. The behavioural approach explains personality through learning: responses that are reinforced organise behaviour, following the principles of conditioning and observational learning. It does not measure stable source traits.
Option (4) Psychodynamic Approach — Incorrect. The psychodynamic approach, begun by Freud, explains personality through unconscious conflicts among the id, the ego and the superego. Its assessment uses methods such as free association and projective techniques, not a trait questionnaire.
NCERT (2025-26): “Cattell: Personality Factors … Raymond Cattell believed that there is a common structure on which people differ from each other. This structure could be determined empirically. He tried to identify the primary traits from a huge array of descriptive adjectives found in language. He applied a statistical technique, called factor analysis, to discover the common structures. He found 16 primary or source traits. The source traits are stable, and are considered as the building blocks of personality. Besides these, there are also a number of surface traits that result out of the interaction of source traits. Cattell described the source traits in terms of opposing tendencies. He developed a test, called Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), for the assessment of personality. This test is widely used by psychologists.…” “Major Approaches to the Study of Personality … The type approaches attempts to comprehend human personality by examining certain broad patterns in the observed behavioural characteristics of individuals. Each behavioural pattern refers to one type in which individuals are placed in terms of the similarity of their behavioural characteristics with that pattern. In contrast, the trait approach focuses on the specific psychological attributes along which individuals tend to differ in consistent and stable ways.…” |