Online Personality Assessment: Equivalence of traditional and WWW personality measures

On-line personality tests are increasingly being used in a number of areas, from psychological research to commercial testing services, and interest in them seems to be growing. In addition to those who are professionally concerned with psychometric testing, people in general (or at least a sizeable number of Internet users) seem to be fascinated by the topic. There are newsgroups and other discussion forums devoted to personality and its assessment (many from a non-academic perspective), and numerous associated websites created by enthusiasts listing and linking to tests which one can do on-line. A recent study (Buchanan, Goldberg & Johnson, 1999) recruited participants purely through entries in search engine databases (e.g. Altavista, Yahoo and Lycos): anyone who ended up participating must have actually been looking for personality tests. Data was acquired at the rate of around 20-25 responses a day. This clearly demonstrates that there are people "out there" interested in personality, and actively seeking tests they can take (an exploration of their reasons for doing this might be interesting). Researchers, of psychological and other persuasions, obviously have much to gain: on-line tests give easy access to large samples and the opportunity to explore interesting questions. Occupational and "business" psychologists may well find many of their activities and working practices changed by this new medium for the delivery of psychometric testing services. Bartram (1998) has outlined one possible scenario, where tests are made available on-line and users would purchase their results from the publisher, and also a number of challenges the testing industry is likely to face. The end-users of psychometric testing services (employers, education, healthcare and other organizations) will also have an interest in this new way of obtaining the services they require. Effectively, anyone who might have had an interest in administering or taking a traditional pencil-and-paper personality test will be affected by on-line assessment. For many of these groups, there are strong reasons to adopt on-line tests—accounts of such reasons are presented by, among others, Buchanan (in press); Buchanan & Smith (1999) and Smith & Leigh (1997). From the test