5 steps to design a good personality surveyPersonality surveys have become a powerful tool for understanding human behavior, personality tests, traits, research, and preferences.
Whether used in academic research, organizational settings, personal careers or personal development, A personality test provides a structured approach to measure the complexities of a personality test.
A personality survey is a systematic assessment that measures various aspects of an individual’s personality test, including traits, career, future, attitudes, and behaviors.
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These surveys help individuals gain self-awareness, identify strengths and weaknesses, and explore areas for personal growth and future.
Personality surveys facilitate effective team-building, personality tests, reliability, talent selection, and career development initiatives in organizational contexts.
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What is a Personality Survey?
A personality survey is defined as a survey that consists of multiple question types that aim to collect insights into the personality of respondents or tests. This survey is mostly introspective that measures life reports in the form of rating scales by using a questionnaire. The data collection from a personality survey provides insights into a human-being and the decision making process as well as the rationale behind that process.
These personality test survey questions are used in the survey software to help distinguish ability from personality. It primarily helps to understand how you relate with others feelings, approach your problems, deal with feelings and understand your personal life.
Surveys have uses in multiple fields but the primary use is in a professional environment where a prospective employee is administered this online survey to gauge temperament, decision making process, business acumen etc. It helps in understanding how motivated to work hard and driven an employee is and the factors that drive the individual.
The other times a personality test survey is used to self-introspect, to match compatibility, assess theories, determine in work, evaluate change in a person after a certain process, diagnosing psychological problems, student evaluation and also sometimes in forensic settings. A student interest survey helps customize teaching methods and curriculum to make learning more engaging and relevant to students’ lives.
Learn more: Personality Survey Questions + Sample Questionnaire Template.
Personality Survey Types
Several types of personality surveys are commonly used to assess and understand individuals’ personalities. Here are some recognized personality type surveys:
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Myers Briggs Type Indicator:
Myers Briggs personality test is a widely used personality test or assessment that categorizes individuals into 16 different personality types based on preferences in four key areas: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Myers Briggs test provides valuable insights into how individuals perceive the industries, make decisions, and interact with others. It’s important to note that while the Myers Briggs Type Indicator can offer valuable insights, the Myers Briggs test is just one tool among many for understanding human personality and has its limitations.
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Big Five Personality Traits:
The Big Five system assesses personality test across five dimensions, including openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits provide a broad framework for understanding personality variation.
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DISC Assessment:
The DISC assessment categorizes individuals into four primary behavioral styles: dominance, interest, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. It helps identify how individuals interact, communicate, and respond in various situations.
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Enneagram:
The Enneagram test is a typing system that helps to describe nine interconnected personality types of research, each associated with distinct motivations, fears, and coping mechanisms. It provides a deeper understanding of an individual’s core desires and fears.
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Hogan Personality Inventory:
The HPI assesses personality traits related to social effectiveness, work approach, and interpersonal interactions. It provides insights into an individual’s typical behavior patterns and potential strengths and challenges in the workplace.
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StrengthsFinder:
The StrengthsFinder assessment test identifies an individual’s top strengths from 34 talent themes. It focuses on identifying and leveraging an individual’s natural talents to enhance personal and professional development.
These are a few personality types, each offering unique and interesting data insights and characteristics into an individual’s projective tests. Selecting the most appropriate type of survey depends on the specific objectives and context in which the assessment will be used.
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Top 25 Questions to Ask in Your Personality Survey
The key to getting accurate responses and a good survey response rate is the survey design. The survey platform consists of an online survey with multiple question types. The personality test survey can be broken down into 2 major sections, the demographic survey and the core personality type question survey.
Personality Survey Questions for Demographic Assessment
The demographic survey questions one of the most important aspects of the personality survey in a questionnaire since they help profile the respondents and in turn help understand how different sets of people have different types of personalities.
Some of the most important demographic questions are:
- Please select your gender for the survey
- What is your highest education completed?
- What is your marital status?
- What is your ethnicity?
- Please select your employment type
Survey Questions for Personality Test
These survey questions are a deep-dive into the personality tests of an individual. The questions in this section are set-up to understand how a certain individual behaves, the decisions describe the making process and temperament of most people.
- Do you like meeting new people?
- Do you like helping people out?
- What do you do if you have been unjustly blamed for something you didn’t do?
- How long does it take you to calm down when you’ve been angry?
- Are you easily disappointed?
- Do you help people only if you think you’d get something in return?
- Do you set up long term goals?
- Are you easily fazed?
- How often do you prefer to go out into a social environment or a public place?
- Are you considerate of other people’s feelings?
- Are you always busy?
- Do you like solving complex problems?
- Do you make people feel welcome?
- Is your go-to reaction in a problem to cheat your way out of it?
- Do you feel overwhelmed often?
- How often do you travel?
- Do you prefer familiarity over unfamiliarity?
- Are you generally passionate about social causes?
- Do you like being pushy?
- Do you tend to always see the good in people, no matter what the circumstance is?
Survey questions for a personality test serve as the foundation for gathering insights into an individual’s unique traits and behaviors. By carefully designing these questions, administrators can unlock valuable information about personality tests or dimensions.
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5 Steps to Design a Good Personality Survey
A personality survey is effective only when set-up right. It is important to have the survey collect the insights that you need to gauge the respondent in the manner that’s most effective to you. Hence, the survey design is extremely important for the projective test.
The 5 steps to designing a good personality survey with abstract ideas, are:
- Define the survey objective: It is imperative to define the survey objective before creating the survey or deploying it to potential respondents. The “why” and “how” is important to be put in the proper place before beginning the study. This ensures that actionable insights can be derived from the data collection.
- Ask the right questions: To get a good survey response rate and to collect deep level personality insights, it is important that the right questions are asked in the survey. This helps the researcher collect personality test data information about a person or a set of people. This is mainly important when a new employee is being on boarded or is being considered for a promotion or role hike.
- Build the survey flow: Most respondents drop out of a survey as the questions if the survey questions are not relevant to them. This makes it very important to effectively use survey skip logic and branching so the preceding answer defines the next question displayed to a survey taker.
- Take the survey for a spin: Before the survey is deployed or administered to potential respondents, it needs to be thoroughly tested. This is to ensure that the survey renders properly and the logic of the survey is correctly developed.
- Analyze and report the survey responses: The data collection is only half of the survey objective. Analyzing and reporting those responses is the other important part of the data collection. Analysis helps draw trend lines and parallels between personalities and how different people react under certain circumstances.
However, it’s essential to recognize that personality is complex and multifaceted, and no survey can capture the entirety of an individual’s personality. Therefore, while personality surveys can be helpful tools, they should be used with other methods and approaches to understand human behavior and traits comprehensively.
Tips for a Good Personality Survey
Creating a good personality survey requires careful planning and consideration. By following these essential tips, you can design a survey that provides valuable insights into individuals’ traits and behaviors.
Let’s explore the key tips for conducting a successful personality survey. Listed below are some tips for a good personality survey:
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Ask unbiased questions:
When you design a survey, make sure that the survey questions are unbiased. Driving respondents towards responding in a certain manner skews the survey results.
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Personality Tests:
Consider incorporating established personality tests into your survey. Personality tests provide a standardized and structured approach to assessing individual traits, behaviors, and preferences. Additionally, the results from projective techniques tests can offer valuable data for analyzing trends, patterns, and correlations among different personality types within your survey population.
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Be respectful with your questions:
In a personality survey, it is very important to be respectful with questions. If respondents feel personally attacked with survey questions, it increases the survey dropout rate.
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Keep consistent answer options:
If the answer options of a survey in the survey software aren’t uniform, it may confuse the respondents and the survey results could subsequently get skewed. Hence, it is important to have consistent answer questions options in the survey.
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Keep questions optional:
Due to the nature of the personality survey, complex or personal questions could form the basis of the survey. It is therefore important to allow the respondents the flexibility to skip questions or they would feel uncomfortable continuing and subsequently drop out of the survey.
A well-designed personality survey can unlock valuable insights into human behavior, personality type, vivid imagination, preferences, and traits. By following the tips, you can create a survey that delivers reliable results and facilitates a deeper understanding of personality.
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Conclusion
Personality surveys are an invaluable tool for gaining insights into human behavior and understanding the complexities of personality. With the help of advanced survey software platforms like QuestionPro, survey administrators can design and implement effective personality surveys that deliver meaningful and reliable results.
QuestionPro offers a range of features and tools that enable survey administrators to create engaging and personalized surveys, such as interactive question types, custom branding, and conditional logic.
By leveraging the power of QuestionPro’s survey software, organizations can design personality surveys that facilitate effective team-building, talent selection, and career development initiatives. Similarly, individuals can use personality surveys to gain self-awareness, identify strengths and weaknesses, and explore areas for personal growth.
