Appreciating Differences - Jack Falt - Ottawa area, Ontario, Canada

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Book Review by Jack Falt

Hammer, Allen L., Snapshots of the 16 Types, Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., 2001, Slide Show CD-ROM, 138 slides.


More and more facilitators are using slide shows that can be presented using a LCD projector or similar method. If a projector is not available or too expensive, a set of overheads can be created on your colour printer or taken to your local photocopy shop where they will do the job for $2.00 to $2.50 an overhead. You could also have a set of 35 mm slides prepared. So it is good to have these resources if time or your own skills are limited. The slides are in PowerPoint, which is a MS Office program. If you don’t have MS PowerPoint, you can download a PowerPoint viewer from the Microsoft web site. The viewer allows you to see the material in a slide show format and print individual slides. With the PowerPoint program, you can add your own slides to the presentation, but with the viewer this is not an option. Also, if you have PowerPoint, you can print up a set of notes to be handed out to participants in a workshop.

For those of you for whom the $4,000 plus cost of a LCD projector is not an option, you can attach a device to your laptop computer that will connect it to your TV. This allows a small group to watch the slides being presented directly from your computer. These devices can be ordered from an electronics shop.

The Snapshots of the 16 types set of slides is for use with a group that has already completed the MBTI® instrument and are knowledgeable about the uses of the inventory. The information presented in the slides is based on research from two independent surveys using the Form M version: in 1997 with 3,033 participants and in 1999 with 1,387 participants. The demographics closely match the 1990 U.S. census. We can only assume that similar results would be obtained in Canada.

The slides cover several areas: population distribution, family makeup, geographic distribution, political affiliation, values, work satisfaction, leisure time, relationships, health, stress, and spirituality. Usually the slides are presented in pairs with one slide showing the type table grid with percentages or words, and the second slide giving a summary of the data. It was interesting to note in the political affiliation data that the top types that were Republican were the four corners, the TJs. Only one type was significantly Democratic and that was the INFJs.

Most of the information presented is not available in the latest Manual so it is worthwhile information to have on hand.

In addition to the slide show, there is a set of notes that can be read with an Adobe Acrobat Reader and then printed up. The notes list the titles of the slides, how you might use the slides in various types and lengths of workshops, and how the research was done.

Most facilitators using the MBTI® instrument would benefit from seeing this presentation as a background to their own work. Being able to show the slides that related to a specific topic such as work satisfaction or spirituality would also be useful. Not too many facilitators have the luxury of having the time to go into the depth to be able to use the full presentation.

I was somewhat disappointed in the quality of the slides themselves. The bullets of information were not animated, i.e. pop up one at a time. There were no eye-catching graphics, just type tables and text slides. However, each section of information had an interesting title graphic. Also, the type tables presenting the data in grid form using used two colours, one for the highest percentage and the other for the lowest. The second slide explained the meaning. It would have been more useful to have a colour legend on the type table slides.

Knowing how many of us have scrambled to find suitable overheads for our presentations, I hope more of these programs become available. The CD-ROM format allows the user to directly project them or create the necessary overheads. Since a colour graphic file is quite large and won’t fit on a 3½ floppy, the CD-ROM is the way to go.

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