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.”

To get into the spirit of personality assessment, please complete the personality inventory below. It has only 10 questions. Simply decide how much each pair of words or phrases fits you.

Take the TIPI Personality Test

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.

Most Big Five inventories are much longer (often 50+ items). The TIPI was designed for situations where time is extremely limited and a researcher needs a quick, “good-enough” snapshot of personality. A longer inventory is usually better when someone needs a more reliable and detailed profile.

Why making a personality test is harder than it looks

At first glance, the TIPI might make test construction seem simple: write a few obvious items, score them, and you have a personality test. That’s exactly why you can find many online “personality quizzes” that look official but don’t measure anything well.

In psychology, a questionnaire isn’t considered a strong personality test unless it has evidence that it is:

• Reliable (produces consistent results)
• Valid (measures what it claims to measure)
• Fair and appropriate across different groups and contexts
• Carefully standardized (administered and scored in a consistent way)

Even widely used tests are continually studied, criticized, and revised as new evidence emerges.

Build a Mini Personality Inventory: BLIRT

Over the next few pages, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how psychologists build a personality questionnaire—from defining a trait clearly to writing items and thinking about how to evaluate reliability and validity.

To keep the focus on test construction (not just familiar traits like extraversion), you’ll work with a less obvious personality dimension:

Blirtatiousness is the tendency to “blirt”—to share personal thoughts and feelings quickly and emotionally during conversation. Some people naturally disclose fast and expressively, while others are more private and restrained.

Creating the BLIRT Scale

Imagine a couple—Khalil and Jen. Khalil is entertaining and expressive; he rarely holds back, and you almost always know what he’s thinking. Jen is kind and dependable—the first to show up when someone needs help—but they tend to keep their feelings and opinions to themself.

In the early 2000s, social psychologist William Swann and his colleagues studied self-disclosure (sharing information about yourself with other people) and how it affects relationships. They described two common styles: “blirters” (quick, enthusiastic disclosers) and “brooders” (more cautious or reserved disclosers). Importantly, they found that neither style is automatically “good” or “bad”—blirting can strengthen relationships in some situations and cause problems in others, and the same is true for brooding.

But the researchers faced a measurement problem. People aren’t always accurate when labeling themselves (“I’m an open book”), and first impressions are unreliable (“He seems like a blirter”). To study self-disclosure scientifically, they needed a consistent way to measure where someone falls on the continuum. That’s why they created a brief questionnaire—the BLIRT scale.^[1]

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