Folk-Concept Trait Scales

This 332-item collection measures 33 everyday 'folk-concept' traits — constructs named in ordinary language, in the tradition of Harrison Gough's California Psychological Inventory (CPI) — each with its public-domain IPIP scale. The folk-concept level trades structural parsimony for direct interpretability: every scale name reads as a plain-language characteristic.

Gough organized the CPI (first published in 1957) around what he called folk concepts: dimensions of interpersonal functioning that ordinary observers already recognize and name — dominance, responsibility, tolerance, self-control. Rather than deriving scales from factor analysis, he favored building them against real-world criteria, so that a scale earned its name by predicting how people who know the respondent would actually describe them (Gough, 1957, 1987).

The inventory became one of the most widely used measures of normal personality of the twentieth century, reaching its third edition in 1996 (Gough & Bradley, 1996). When five-factor researchers later mapped the CPI's folk scales onto the Big Five, they found systematic — though far from one-to-one — correspondences, locating Gough's criterion-first tradition inside the modern trait taxonomy (McCrae, Costa, & Piedmont, 1993).

The scales administered here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to those of the CPI tradition, carrying the everyday construct names catalogued at ipip.ori.org; scores here are not scores on the California Psychological Inventory itself, and published CPI norms and validity evidence do not transfer to this form. Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim.

Each trait is reported against Eugene–Springfield Community Sample reference values in the norms section.

“Acknowledge others' accomplishments.”

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 population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Norms computed from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample (ESCS) — Lewis R. Goldberg’s adult community panel from Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/UF52WY). This is a community sample and is NOT nationally representative. The mean, standard deviation, reference N and Cronbach’s α were computed directly from the raw IPIP item-level responses on THIS scale’s exact item set and reverse-keying (complete cases); reference N varies by scale and is shown with each scale below. The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from that computed α.

Public-domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, L. R., 1999; ipip.ori.org). Scale membership and reverse-keying taken verbatim from Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items). Construct names from ipip.ori.org.