Personal interviews -- especially what the respondent actually says in them -- can be extremely useful to humanist practitioners. They also share a reliance on objective tests -- where the respondent attempts, in a guided way, to assess their own behavior and/or personality, with the two remaining branches of personality assessment.
Trait-based and social-learning psychology have vastly different approaches to assessing personality, but there are also some commonalities insofar as how they assess personality. Trait-based theorists believe that people exhibit specific behavioral traits, and that these can be analyzed to determine personality. Tests like the Big Five indicator are trait-based assessors. Social-learning theorists, on the other hand, believe that certain cognitive patterns are set early on, and that behavior (and personality) is determined by these unique cognitive processes working with the sum experience...
For this reason, social-learning theorists do not see behavior as consistent, but rather see the underlying cognitive rules that determine an individual's behavior in a given situation as consistent. Both use objective tests to asses personality, however, with social-learning theorists also using simple observation as a measure.
The Jungian word test at similarminds.com appears to be a mostly objective test, though I suspect it of some projective applications as well (especially given the repetition of certain words in the context of different surrounding words). In general, I tend to trust objective test more when it comes to me, but less when it comes to other people -- the arrogance of being an Architect (INTP) I guess. I think this test was very accurate; it matches up with the other Jungian-type indicator tests I've taken, and the description is spot-on.
