International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Obsessive-Compulsive Screen (OCS-12)
A 12-item clean-room screen of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, including checking, washing, ordering, and intrusive thoughts, built from original public-domain items written in the style of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). It is distinct from the IPIP Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms facet scale.
This is a clinical instrument. It is not publicly self-administered; a clinician assigns it through a secure patient link.
You learn whether your checking, ordering or worrying habits suggest an obsessive-compulsive pattern.
For anyone who wonders whether their checking, cleaning or worry habits go beyond the usual.
It comes from clinical research on screening for obsessive and compulsive patterns.
What this test is
Welcome. A 12-item clean-room screen of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, including checking, washing, ordering, and intrusive thoughts, built from original public-domain items written in the style of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). It is distinct from the IPIP Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms facet scale.
The measure
It has 12 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale.
At a glance
What it measures
Twelve statements describe the main kinds of obsessive-compulsive experience: checking things repeatedly, washing or cleaning more than seems necessary, needing things to be arranged in a particular order, counting or repeating actions, and having unwanted, upsetting thoughts that are hard to dismiss. The statements describe both the thoughts and the actions that follow from them.
The content follows the symptom groups that Foa and colleagues (2002) identified in the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, Revised: washing, checking, ordering, obsessing, hoarding and neutralizing. This screen was written for this site in the style of the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), as a short, freely usable approximation of that content.
The twelve ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe more frequent obsessive-compulsive thoughts and behaviors; lower scores describe few such experiences. Many people have some of these experiences without difficulty; a high score suggests that a fuller assessment may be useful, and it is not a diagnosis.
The screen is used for self-reflection and as a first step before a fuller assessment. On this site, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, Revised (OCI-R) measures distress from six symptom groups, the Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms scale describes related tendencies, and the Need for Order and Cleanliness scale describes a normal-range preference for order.
Validity evidence
The subscales (obsessional thoughts, compulsive behavior) operationalize well-established clinical constructs validated across OCD research. Items were constructed in the IPIP tradition to avoid copyright while capturing the same clinical domains.
Example item
“Check things over and over again.”
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
- Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7-28.
- Foa, E. B., Kozak, M. J., Salkovskis, P. M., Coles, M. E., & Amir, N. (1998). The validation of a new obsessive-compulsive disorder scale: The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 10(3), 206-214.
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.
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Score | Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key. |
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