Sixteen-Factor Personality Profile

The Sixteen-Factor Personality Profile spans sixteen primary trait factors — including warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, and openness to change — with 48 public-domain IPIP items. The sixteen-primary-factor tradition predates the Big Five and offers a finer-grained first pass at normal-range personality.

Each factor is scored in its keyed direction and shown against Eugene–Springfield Community Sample reference values in the norms section. With three items per factor, standings are indicative sketches; the longer inventories in the catalog provide more reliable per-construct measurement.

The notes below are reproduced from the platform's psychometrics register for this instrument — the same source-cited reliability, validity, and norms text that accompanies its downloadable report.

Items are drawn from the IPIP public-domain pool targeting sixteen personality dimensions. Subscale reliabilities vary with scale length; IPIP scales of 3–6 items typically yield alphas in the .60s–.70s.

The sixteen construct dimensions draw on broad personality theory covering extraversion, anxiety, independence, and self-control, among others. Item selection follows IPIP convergent-validity standards, and the constructs have been validated in numerous applied settings.

Scores are expressed as percent-of-maximum on the 1–5 accuracy scale using Higher/Average/Lower bands. No population normative tables have been published for this specific public-domain sixteen-factor operationalization.

“Make people feel at ease.”

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.

Items drawn from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), placed in the public domain. Goldberg, L. R., et al. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–96.