The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures

Seven experts on personality measurement here discuss the viability of public-domain personality measures, focusing on the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) as a prototype. Since its inception in 1996, the use of items and scales from the IPIP has increased dramatically. Items from the IPIP have been translated from English into more than 25 other languages. Currently over 80 publications using IPIP scales are listed at the IPIP Web site (http://ipip.ori.org), and the rate of IPIPrelated publications has been increasing rapidly. The growing popularity of the IPIP can be attributed to Wve factors: (1) It is cost free; (2) its items can be obtained instantaneously via the Internet; (3) it includes over 2000 items, all easily available for inspection; (4) scoring keys for IPIP scales are This article represents a synthesis of contributions to the presidential symposium, The International Personality Item Pool and the Future of Public-Domain Personality Measures (L.R. Goldberg, Chair) at the sixth annual meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, New Orleans, January 20, 2005. Authorship order is based on the order of participation in the symposium. The IPIP project has been continually supported by Grant MH049227 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service. J.A. Johnson’s research was supported by the DuBois Educational Foundation. The authors thank Paul T. Costa Jr., Samuel D. Gosling, Leonard G. Rorer, Richard Reed, and Krista Trobst for their helpful suggestions. * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 814 375 4784. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. Johnson). 0092-6566/$ see front matter  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007 L.R. Goldberg et al. / Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006) 84–96 85 provided; and (5) its items can be presented in any order, interspersed with other items, reworded, translated into other languages, and administered on the World Wide Web without asking permission of anyone. The unrestricted availability of the IPIP raises concerns about possible misuse by unqualiWed persons, and the freedom of researchers to use the IPIP in idiosyncratic ways raises the possibility of fragmentation rather than scientiWc uniWcation in personality research.  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.