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It’s What You Ask and How You Ask It: An Itemmetric Analysis of Personality Questionnaires

  • Chapter
Personality Assessment via Questionnaires

Abstract

Items from personality questionnaires have long been the butt of humorists and jaded graduate students. What makes these satirical items so funny is that they are instantaneously recognizable as having the correct form and yet their content is patently absurd. The fact that these items succeed as jokes suggests that at least for those familiar with personality scales there are some standard forms for items. This chapter describes three sets of formal item characteristics and demonstrates that the psychometric quality of personality items depends not only on content but also on form.

“The sight of blood no longer excites me.”

“When I was a child, I was an imaginary playmate.”

“I become homicidal when people try to reason with me.”

“It’s hard to concentrate in a room full of mice.”

Order of authorship is alphabetical; this chapter represents a fully collaborative effort by the three authors, based in pari on a paper delivered at the Bielefeld Symposium on Personality Questionnaires, which was held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Bielefeld, June 17–20, 1982. Some of the analyses presented in this chapter are based on Franz-Josef Lohr’s PhD dissertation (in preparation), a complete report of which may appear elsewhere.

We are grateful to Peter Borkenau, David Buss, William F. Chaplin, Donald Fiske, Sarah Hampson, Willem Hofstee, and Wolf Nowack for their comments on earlier drafts, and especially to Lewis R. Goldberg, the master wordsmith, whose untiring efforts helped improve the readability of this chapter considerably. Our research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) An 105/1-3. Funds for the support of the second author during the writing of this report were provided in part by Grant MH-39077 from the National Institute of Mental Health (U.S. Public Health Service).

With the exception of the fourth statement, these “items” were written by Art Buchwald, the noted American humorist (as cited in Goldberg. 1974).

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Authors
  1. Alois Angleitner
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  2. Oliver P. John
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  3. Franz-Josef Löhr
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld, Universitätsstraße, D-4800, Bielefeld 1, Deutschland

    Alois Angleitner

  2. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2075 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V6T 1W5

    Jerry S. Wiggins

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Angleitner, A., John, O.P., Löhr, FJ. (1986). It’s What You Ask and How You Ask It: An Itemmetric Analysis of Personality Questionnaires. In: Angleitner, A., Wiggins, J.S. (eds) Personality Assessment via Questionnaires. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70751-3_5

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