Narrow-Trait Composites

Forty-five small groups of statements describe specific, concrete tendencies: liking parties, liking crowds, being entertaining, enjoying reading, having a good memory, having mathematical or scientific ability, being even-tempered, being trusting, avoiding trouble, having good impulse control, and many more. Each group is narrow by design, describing one recognizable habit or preference rather than a broad dimension.

Hogan and Hogan (1992) organized their personality inventory around small groups of closely related items, called homogeneous item composites, which combine into broader scales. Goldberg (1999) wrote parallel composites for the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), so that the same narrow tendencies can be measured freely.

Each composite is scored separately. Higher scores describe a stronger presence of the named tendency; lower scores describe its absence. Because each composite has only a few statements, individual scores are best read as indications, and patterns across related composites are more informative than any one score.

The composites are used in research and in detailed personal and occupational assessment. On this site, the Work-Relevant Personality Scales and Workplace Personality Profile combine narrow tendencies into broader work-related scales, and the Folk-Concept Trait Scales describe everyday traits at a middle level of breadth.

The HIC is the HPI's structural signature. Instead of writing one long scale per construct, Hogan composed each broad dimension from several homogeneous item composites — a handful of items each, all restating one narrow theme — so a profile can be read at two levels of resolution: the broad dimension, and the specific habits underneath it (Hogan & Hogan, 1992).

This collection is the IPIP's catalogue of those building blocks.

The scales here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to the HPI's HICs; scores here are not scores on the Hogan Personality Inventory or its internal composites, and HPI-based interpretation does not transfer to this form. Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim, with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

These composites measure narrow traits, such as calmness, mastery, empathy and thrill seeking, built from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 2006). Narrow traits like these predict specific behaviors better than the broad five factors alone (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).

Each narrow trait relates mainly to one or two broad factors while keeping specific variance of its own, which gives it discriminant value beyond the broad factors (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).

“Accept apologies easily.”

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

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