The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures

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Abstract

Seven experts on personality measurement here discuss the viability of public-domain personality measures, focusing on the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) as a prototype. Since its inception in 1996, the use of items and scales from the IPIP has increased dramatically. Items from the IPIP have been translated from English into more than 25 other languages. Currently over 80 publications using IPIP scales are listed at the IPIP Web site (http://ipip.ori.org), and the rate of IPIP-related publications has been increasing rapidly. The growing popularity of the IPIP can be attributed to five factors: (1) It is cost free; (2) its items can be obtained instantaneously via the Internet; (3) it includes over 2000 items, all easily available for inspection; (4) scoring keys for IPIP scales are provided; and (5) its items can be presented in any order, interspersed with other items, reworded, translated into other languages, and administered on the World Wide Web without asking permission of anyone. The unrestricted availability of the IPIP raises concerns about possible misuse by unqualified persons, and the freedom of researchers to use the IPIP in idiosyncratic ways raises the possibility of fragmentation rather than scientific unification in personality research.

Introduction

This article continues a discussion about the viability of public-domain personality measures that began at the eighth European Conference on Personality (ECP) in 1996 (Costa and McCrae, 1999, Goldberg, 1999a, Goldberg, 1999b). At that 1996 conference, a new public-domain personality resource, the International Personality Item Pool, abbreviated IPIP (Goldberg, 1999a), was first introduced, amid substantial qualms about its potential usefulness (Costa & McCrae, 1999). Now, nearly 10 years later, we here consider (a) the degree to which the IPIP has lived up to its promise, (b) future directions that might be taken, and (c) more generally, whether public-domain resources such as the IPIP will in fact become a viable alternative to commercial personality inventories.

The article is divided into two major sections. The first section is descriptive and the second analytic. The first section describes the history and rationale behind the construction of the IPIP and then provides a detailed portrait of what the IPIP looks like today as a result of those efforts. The second section of the article analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the IPIP based on feedback from users.

Section snippets

The development of the international personality item pool

The stimulus behind the IPIP was a perception that “the science of personality assessment has progressed at a dismally slow pace since the first personality inventories were developed over 75 years ago” (Goldberg, 1999a, p. 7). In a previous historical review, Goldberg (1995) had discussed a number of causes for the field’s lack of consensus on a scientifically reasonable taxonomic structure for human personality traits. One major cause was the negative Zeitgeist for personality research

A consultant’s experiences with the IPIP: The good, the bad, and the ugly

From the time he began serving as the IPIP consultant in August 1999 through January, 2005, Johnson (2005b) had received approximately 800 e-mail messages from over 400 individuals interested in using IPIP scales for research or education. These individuals included high school students with science-fair projects, high school teachers creating demonstrations for their courses, graduate students conducting dissertation research, college and university faculty desiring to employ IPIP scales in

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    This article represents a synthesis of contributions to the presidential symposium, The International Personality Item Pool and the Future of Public-Domain Personality Measures (L.R. Goldberg, Chair) at the sixth annual meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, New Orleans, January 20, 2005. Authorship order is based on the order of participation in the symposium. The IPIP project has been continually supported by Grant MH049227 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service. J.A. Johnson’s research was supported by the DuBois Educational Foundation. The authors thank Paul T. Costa Jr., Samuel D. Gosling, Leonard G. Rorer, Richard Reed, and Krista Trobst for their helpful suggestions.

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