Six-Factor Personality Scales

This 233-item collection measures the 24 subscales of the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (6FPQ; Jackson, Paunonen, & Tremblay, 2000), four per factor, using public-domain IPIP scales throughout. The six broad factors — Extraversion, Agreeableness, Independence, Openness to Experience, Methodicalness, and Industriousness — each carry a subscale bearing the factor's own name plus three narrower companions.

Many of the subscale names read straight out of Henry A. Murray's catalogue of psychogenic needs — Affiliation, Dominance, Exhibition, Endurance, Autonomy, Abasement, Understanding — the conceptual vocabulary of Explorations in Personality (Murray, 1938), carried into questionnaire form by Douglas Jackson's construct-driven program of test development.

Jackson and colleagues argued from factor-analytic evidence that five factors under-describe personality, proposing six recurrent dimensions instead (Jackson, Paunonen, Fraboni, & Goffin, 1996); the 6FPQ (Jackson, Paunonen, & Tremblay, 2000) fixed that six-factor architecture in a purpose-built instrument. The collection is thus a bridge between the needs psychology of the 1930s and the modern factor-model debate.

The subscales here are original public-domain IPIP items keyed to constructs similar to the 6FPQ's scales; scores here are not scores on the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire itself, and its published evidence 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.

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

“Accept people as they are.”

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.