Self-report measure

Locus of Control: Chance

Locus of Control: Chance uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Locus of Control: Chance.

You learn how much you credit luck and chance for what happens in your life.

For anyone who wonders how much they believe luck decides what happens to them.

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Pay $4 before you start. The full report and PDF are included.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from social learning research on beliefs about chance and fate.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Locus of Control: Chance uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Locus of Control: Chance.

The measure

It has 10 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale.

International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org).

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Pay before you start · $4, or $2 to repeat · full report and PDF included

What it measures

Ten statements describe the belief that events are governed by luck: that whether one gets into an accident is mostly a matter of luck, that it is not wise to plan too far ahead because many things turn out to be a matter of fortune, and that getting what one wants depends on being in the right place at the right time.

Rotter (1966) introduced locus of control, the generalized expectation that outcomes depend on one's own behavior (internal) or on outside forces (external). Levenson (1981) divided external control into two forms, powerful others and chance, because believing that other people control one's life differs from believing that nobody does. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe a stronger belief that outcomes are unpredictable and governed by chance; lower scores describe a stronger sense that events follow from identifiable causes. The belief can reflect real experience of unpredictable circumstances as well as outlook.

The scale is used in research on motivation, health behavior and well-being. On this site, the Internality and Powerful Others scales complete Levenson's model, and the Locus of Control: Total scale gives an overall score.

Validity evidence

Chance external locus — belief that outcomes are determined by luck or fate — is associated with fatalism, reduced health behaviors, and lower motivation for goal-directed effort (Levenson, 1974).

Example item

“Believe that unfortunate events occur because of bad luck.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

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

Scoring & interpretation

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.

References

Levenson, H. (1974). Activism and powerful others: Distinctions within the concept of internal-external control. Journal of Personality Assessment, 38(4), 377-383.
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7-28.

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.

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