Self-report measure

Locus of Control: Internality

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

You learn how much you see yourself as the author of your own outcomes.

For anyone curious how strongly they believe their own actions shape their life.

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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 the sense of personal control.

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

What this test is

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

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 one shapes one's own outcomes: that whether one gets to be a leader depends mostly on one's ability, that one's life is determined by one's own actions, and that when one gets what one wants it is usually because one worked for it.

Rotter (1966) introduced locus of control as a generalized expectation about whether outcomes depend on one's own behavior. Levenson (1981) measured internality separately from two kinds of external belief, in powerful others and in chance, recognizing that they are not simple opposites. 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 sense of personal control over outcomes; lower scores describe a weaker sense of personal agency. Higher internality has generally been associated with active coping and achievement, though it can bring self-blame when outcomes are genuinely outside one's control.

The scale is used in research on motivation, achievement and health. On this site, the Chance and Powerful Others scales measure external beliefs, and the Optimism scale describes a related positive outlook.

Validity evidence

Internal locus of control — the belief that outcomes are controlled by one's own actions — is associated with lower stress, better academic performance, and proactive coping (Rotter, 1966; Wallston et al., 1978).

Example item

“Believe that my success depends on ability rather than 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

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

References

Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80(1), 1-28.
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.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

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