Creating a Personality Questionnaire
Psychologists often assess a person’s personality using a questionnaire that is filled in by the person who is being assessed. Such a test is called a “self-report inventory.”
The questionnaire you just completed is called the TIPI: The Ten-Item Personality Inventory. It was created by University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling as a very brief measure of “Big Five” personality characteristics: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.
Several different self-report inventories have been developed to measure the Big Five factors, most with 50 or more questions. The TIPI, which you just took, was developed for situations where time is very limited and the tester (usually a researcher) needs a “good enough” version of the test. One of the longer versions would be used by someone needing a more reliable and nuanced view of someone’s personality.
Looking at the TIPI, you might have the impression that creating a personality inventory is pretty easy. You come up with a few obvious questions, find names that fit, and you’re ready to claim you are measuring something about people’s personality. Undoubtedly you can find some “personality tests” on the internet that fit this description, but tests created by serious psychologists for use in research or in clinical settings must go through a much more careful development process before they are widely accepted and used. And, even then, the tests continue to be studied, criticized, and revised.
In this exercise, we will look more closely at some of the work that goes into creating a personality inventory or questionnaire. To help you keep your eyes on the process of test construction, we want you to think about a personality dimension that is not as obvious as self-esteem or extroversion. We are going to assess blirtatiousness, or the likelihood that a person will “blirt” out information about themselves or interact with high emotions during a conversation.