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Authors' reply to commentary on accounting information systems research opportunities using personality type theory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Article Excerpt
We appreciate Professor Lampe's (2004) many thoughtful comments on our paper. We largely agree with him. Like Lampe, we see the MBTI as one useful psychometric instrument among many available and acceptable instruments. In our article, we primarily examine the MBTI in isolation, and do not compare it to other psychometric instruments. We did not intend to imply that other instruments are without value by using this approach. Instruments such as the Millon Inventory of Personality Styles (MIPS), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), and the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) are useful for various types of AIS research. (1) Nevertheless, we think that the MBTI has three comparative strengths: (1) researchers have extensively tested the validity and reliability of the MBTI over approximately four decades; (2) the MBTI is grounded within a comprehensive psychology of personality; and (3) the MBTI is well suited for research examining the relationship of cognition and information processing to personality.

In regard to the first strength, which was dealt with in detail in the paper, we express disagreement with Lampe's comments about the test/retest reliability of the MBTI. Most reports of the MBTI's test/retest reliability have shown these correlations to be relatively high. For example, in Myers et al. (1998), the low-to-high test/retest range is 84 percent to 96 percent agreement of the bipolarities over a four-week period for Form M. Regarding Form G, the form Girelli and Stake (1993) reported, the range is 75 percent to 87 percent (Myers et al. 1998). The Girelli and Stake (1993) paper, cited by Lampe for its low MBTI test/retest scores, has met with methodological criticisms (Murray 1996); specifically, the researchers substituted the MBTI's forced-choice format with a Likert-scale format and then analyzed the...

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