Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms

Eleven statements describe obsessive-compulsive tendencies: checking things more often than necessary, washing hands repeatedly, needing to arrange things in a particular way, having upsetting thoughts that come to mind against one's will, and feeling compelled to repeat actions. They describe the habits as general tendencies rather than over a set time frame.

Foa and colleagues (2002) identified the main symptom groups of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, Revised: washing, checking, ordering, obsessing, hoarding and neutralizing. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and were keyed to parallel that measure.

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe more frequent obsessive-compulsive thoughts and behaviors; lower scores describe few. Mild versions of these experiences are common, and a high score suggests that a fuller assessment may be useful rather than indicating a diagnosis.

The scale is used in personality and clinical research. On this site, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, Revised (OCI-R) measures distress from symptoms over the past month, the Obsessive-Compulsive Screen is a short screen, and the Need for Order and Cleanliness scale describes a normal-range preference for order.

Items operationalize checking, ordering, obsessing, and neutralizing behaviors consistent with the OCI-R construct, which shows good convergent validity with clinical OCD ratings (Foa et al., 1998).

“Repeatedly check doors, windows, and drawers.”

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

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.