1.6 International Personality Item Pool (IPIP)
Purpose
The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) is a comprehensive resource for personality assessment made possible through scientific collaboration. It fosters user-driven research by allowing the construction of custom leadership scales using items from existing scales or the entire 3,300-item pool. The IPIP can be used by individuals seeking to understand their own personality traits or by researchers, clinicians, educators, or HR professionals who wish to conduct personality assessments. This includes:
Participants in research studies: Volunteers can complete an IPIP assessment as part of psychological or behavioral research.
Patients in clinical settings: Individuals may take an IPIP assessment to help clinicians understand their personality profile as part of a therapeutic assessment.
Employees and job candidates: Individuals in the workplace may be assessed for traits relevant to job performance and fit within organizational culture.
The IPIP is particularly useful in settings where a comprehensive assessment of personality traits is needed. It provides detailed scores on multiple personality dimensions, offering insights that can be used to enhance personal understanding, improve workplace efficiency, support clinical interventions, and contribute to academic research (Goldberg et al., 2006).
Description
The IPIP was developed in the 1990s by Goldberg and colleagues (Goldberg et al., 2006). It currently offers users a collection of more than 250 scales and 3,300 items that measure a wide range of personality constructs. These include the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).
The IPIP uses a variety of question formats, primarily Likert-type questions where respondents indicate their level of agreement with statements on a scale (e.g., from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”).
The IPIP website provides instructions for scoring and evaluating the psychometric properties of the scales, including the calculation of alpha coefficients to assess internal consistency. The results are analyzed to provide scores on different personality dimensions, which can then be compared to normative data from a large database of previous respondents.
For researchers, the IPIP offers a valuable resource for exploring the link between personality and various outcomes. By searching the “Publications that employ the IPIP” section, users can identify studies that utilize IPIP items or scales (e.g., 17 articles found for “leader”). Research has shown strong correlations between IPIP measures and established personality inventories like the NEO PI-R, along with evidence for the IPIP’s ability to predict outcomes such as job performance, academic achievement, and relationship satisfaction.
Studies by Goldberg and others have shown that the IPIP is a reliable and accurate way to measure personality Johnson (2014). Internal consistency (alpha coefficients) typically ranges from .86 to .92, and the instrument has shown high inter-rater reliability (mean correlation of .78). Limitations can include potential biases in self-reported data and the need for further validation in diverse cultural contexts. Additionally, the high number of items can be overwhelming for some respondents, and there may be practical constraints in administering such a comprehensive assessment in certain settings.
Access
The items and scales on the IPIP website (https://ipip.ori.org/) are within the public domain. This designation allows users to freely copy, edit, translate, or utilize them for any purpose without requiring permission or incurring fees (Goldberg et al., 2006).
Reference
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Angold, A. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003
