| MBTI® STEP III™ Development: WHAT,
WHY, HOW, WHO, WHEN?
You may have heard about something called “Step III” during
the past few years but be unclear about what it is. The following
provides accurate and up-to-date information about Step III
and its development.
What is MBTI® Step III™? Step III™ is
a way of scoring the MBTI® instrument that shows a respondent's
current ways of using perception and judgment and the likely
effectiveness of those uses, which is assumed to be evidence
of type development. Suggestions and recommendations
for enhancing one's uses of perception and judgment will be
included in the materials that are yet to be developed. As
with all aspects of the MBTI® instrument, Step III™ scoring
is interpreted in the context of healthy personality and will
require respondent verification of results.
Why is Step III™ being developed? When Isabel
Myers' conceptualized the development of the Indicator, she
had a vision that went beyond the identification of basic individual
type preferences. Results that indicate preferences for one
of the 16 types is now known as Step
I™. The MBTI
Step II ™ process has fulfilled
Isabel Myers' plan to provide people with individualized type
reports that reflected their distinctive way of expressing
their type preferences. MBTI® Step
III ™ analysis
actualizes Myers' goal of helping people use their natural
types as effectively as possible. She was convinced that understanding
your patterns of perception and judgment “can make your perceptions
clearer, your judgments sounder, and your life closer to your
heart's desire.”
How is MBTI® Step III™ being developed? Myers
created several scales and a number of patterns of responding
to MBTI items. She found these to be related to specific
ways people used their types and did extensive research to
validate this work. Myers and Mary McCaulley, former
president of CAPT (who died in August 2003), were working on
this aspect of type at the time of Myers' death in 1980. That
early work is currently being validated on more recent samples,
reports are being designed that describe a respondent's uses
of perception and judgment, and ways to enhance one's type
effectiveness are being developed and tested. Ongoing studies
are examining large data bases. A new research form will gather
data on new samples along with information on other relevant
variables.
Who is developing Step III? Step III™ development
is a collaborative effort involving CPP, publisher of the MBTI;
CAPT (Center for Applications of Psychological Type), which
is in possession of all of Myers' and McCaulley's original
work; the Myers Family, owners of the MBTI, and a team of consultant
experts (Allen Hammer, Ph.D., Wayne Mitchell, Ph.D., and Naomi
Quenk, Ph.D.) Other researchers and type users will be invited
to participate and share data as the project develops. We
expect to have needs for certain kinds of data at future stages
in Step III™ development. These needs will not be known
until we have progressed through the early stages of development. As
a result, the team is not yet seeking people to share or help
us collect data and we cannot respond to offers of help at
this time.
Who will use Step III? Because
this is a new instrument with information that differs from
standard Step I™ and Step II™ information, there will be educational
requirements, criteria for use, and training of users to meet
specific standards. The earliest form of Step II was
similarly restricted, and later was made more generally available
as more was known about its potential uses for clients.
How will Step III users be trained? A training
program to thoroughly familiarize users with the contents,
purposes, and appropriate clients and uses of the Step III™ component
is being developed.
When will Step III be available? The Step
III team has made enormous progress in the year since the Step
III™ project was approved for development, and work is surging
forward in validation, form creation, report development, and
preparation for future collaborators in this endeavor. We will
keep you informed regularly regarding our progress.
CHECK TYPE WEBSITES AND THE BULLETIN OF PSYCHOLOGICAL
TYPE FOR ONGOING PROJECT PROGRESS REPORTS,
AS WELL AS FUTURE REQUESTS FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THIS
EXCITING “TYPE DEVELOPMENT!”
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