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Rating: 
Summary: Big Book, Little Value
Review: Salvatore Didato's "Big Book of Personality Tests" is a good idea, poorly completed. The book consists of eight chapters each dealing with an important aspect of life: Romance, Happiness, Work, Emotions, etc. Within these chapters 100 personality quizzes are offered, many with intriguing titles, such as: How Romantic Are You? How's Your Sense of Humor? and Can You Control Your Own Destiny? The reader is drawn in to complete a test, only to discover that each is only 10 to 12 questions long and most are just statements that require a true/false answer. These tests are not scientifically valid psychological assessments, but merely the author's ideas of what may be useful questions. How foolish does the author/publisher expect readers to be by addressing serious issues like marital unhappiness, parenting problems, and career change with a handful of unvalidated questions? While many questions are "based on" scientific psychological tools, no percentiles, averages, or normative information can be shared because there are none. It is like asking for an x-ray and being handed a flash light. Once the reader completes each test one sentence on how to calculate the score is offered, then the reader is provided with another couple of lines of banal analysis: "You should do as well as the average person." Has the reader learned a personal insight? Is the reader entertained? Is there some common good produced by this book? The answers to these questions are all the same. Dr, Didato's goal of informing readers of psychological concepts is a noble one, however this book soundly fails that test.
Rating:
Summary: Big Book, Little Value
Review: Salvatore Didato's "Big Book of Personality Tests" is a good idea, poorly completed. The book consists of eight chapters each dealing with an important aspect of life: Romance, Happiness, Work, Emotions, etc. Within these chapters 100 personality quizzes are offered, many with intriguing titles, such as: How Romantic Are You? How's Your Sense of Humor? and Can You Control Your Own Destiny? The reader is drawn in to complete a test, only to discover that each is only 10 to 12 questions long and most are just statements that require a true/false answer. These tests are not scientifically valid psychological assessments, but merely the author's ideas of what may be useful questions. How foolish does the author/publisher expect readers to be by addressing serious issues like marital unhappiness, parenting problems, and career change with a handful of unvalidated questions? While many questions are "based on" scientific psychological tools, no percentiles, averages, or normative information can be shared because there are none. It is like asking for an x-ray and being handed a flash light. Once the reader completes each test one sentence on how to calculate the score is offered, then the reader is provided with another couple of lines of banal analysis: "You should do as well as the average person." Has the reader learned a personal insight? Is the reader entertained? Is there some common good produced by this book? The answers to these questions are all the same. Dr, Didato's goal of informing readers of psychological concepts is a noble one, however this book soundly fails that test.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Collection of Quizzes
Review: The Big Book of Personality Tests by S.V. Didato is a well-written
collection of quizzes which are easy to take, about 15-20 minutes each. They
cover, what the author says are 8 life domains like,your true self, your
family life, social life, work attitudes, intelligence, your true potential
etc.. The book is not a deep psychoanalytic probe into one's personality( no book
ever written can do that) but merely a capsule glimpse into one's behavior
which suggests further self study. Didato tries to keep it from being a heavy reading, reference-laden text
book, but rather a straight-forward, easy to read and understandable book.
It offers a capsule summary of various personality traits which give
readers a pretty good picture of themselves in a most enjoyable way. The amusing cartoons are almost worth the price of the book itself.
I especially found helpful the quiz on questions job interviewers focus on
and how to handle them. The validity of the tests in this book is solidly based on clinical
experience or actual research done at universities in the US and around the
world, which most media quizzes don't do. The author encourages readers to
contact him if more research references are desired, something quite unique
for a writer to do.
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