Self-report measure

Locus of Control: Total

Locus of Control: Total uses 20 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Locus of Control: Total.

You learn your overall balance between personal control, luck and the influence of others.

For anyone who wants one overall view of their beliefs about control, luck and other people.

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Report and PDF $4, paid after you finish.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from social learning research combining personal, chance and others-based control beliefs.

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

What this test is

Welcome. Locus of Control: Total uses 20 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Locus of Control: Total.

The measure

It has 20 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

~3 min

Access

Free to take · Full report and PDF for $4, or $2 to repeat

What it measures

Twenty statements describe beliefs about control over one's life: whether success follows from effort, whether plans tend to work out, whether misfortune is the result of one's own mistakes or of bad luck, and whether influential people decide what happens. Together they place a person on a continuum from internal to external control.

Rotter (1966) introduced locus of control as a generalized expectation, developed through experience, about whether rewards depend on one's own behavior. The concept became one of the most widely studied in personality and social psychology. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

The ratings are combined into a single score, keyed toward internal control. Higher scores describe a stronger belief that outcomes follow from one's own actions; lower scores describe a stronger belief that they depend on luck or others. Neither end is simply better: realistic beliefs about control depend on circumstances.

The scale is used in research on motivation, achievement, health and well-being, and in counseling. On this site, the Internality, Powerful Others and Chance scales separate the components, and the rational short form gives a brief version.

Validity evidence

The composite score provides an overall locus of control profile that integrates internal (self-directed) and external (fate/chance) orientations, consistent with Rotter's (1966) original conceptualization.

Example item

“Feel comfortable with myself.”

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

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.

It is free to take, and the full report with a downloadable copy is $4.

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