Achievement & Interpersonal Trait Scales

Fifteen traits describe how a person approaches work and other people. Achievement-related traits include Energy Level, Organization, Responsibility, Innovation, Complexity, Breadth of Interest and Risk Taking; interpersonal traits include Sociability, Social Confidence, Empathy, Cooperativeness, Tolerance and Social Astuteness; and Anxiety and Traditional Values complete the set. Statements describe each in everyday terms, such as having a lot of energy, finding new ways to do things or knowing how to get around rules.

The traits follow the Jackson Personality Inventory, Revised (Jackson, 1994), which Jackson built with careful attention to defining each trait precisely and minimizing overlap between scales. Goldberg (1999) wrote parallel scales for the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), keyed to the same fifteen traits.

Each trait is scored separately. Higher scores describe a stronger, more consistent version of the trait; lower scores describe its opposite, which may suit different settings. The traits are narrower than the five broad domains, so the profile can show, for example, a person who is innovative but not a risk taker, or sociable but not socially confident.

The scales are used in research on personality at work and in career counseling and coaching. On this site, the Work-Relevant Personality Scales describe traits in occupational terms, the Six-Factor Personality Scales follow a related model, and the IPIP-NEO-120 describes the five broad domains and their facets.

Douglas N. Jackson was one of psychology's most rigorous test builders: he championed construct-driven scale development — define the construct from theory first, write items to it, then cull them for convergent and discriminant power — as the alternative to the era's empirically keyed inventories. The Jackson Personality Inventory, first published in 1976, applied that program to normal-range social and cognitive styles; the 1994 revision reorganized it into the fifteen scales represented here (Jackson, 1994).

Jackson also kept alive a structural dissent from the five-factor consensus, arguing with colleagues from factor-analytic evidence that personality space is better described by six factors than five (Jackson, Paunonen, Fraboni, & Goffin, 1996) — a position his Six Factor Personality Questionnaire, also represented on this platform, made concrete.

Scale membership and reverse-keying are taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items), with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

“Accomplish a lot of work.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.