How this questionnaire is built
This page explains what the questionnaire is based on and where its questions come from. You do not need to have read it in order to answer, and it is written to be understandable without any specialist knowledge.
The model: the five broad factors
The questionnaire is based on the Big Five (also known as the Five-Factor Model), the most established way in the research literature to describe differences in personality. The five factors are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability; each one breaks down into more specific aspects, called facets.
It is not a classification into types: there are no five categories of people to be sorted into. Each factor is a continuous scale, and a profile is a position on each of them. No position is right or wrong, and no result describes a person’s worth.
Where the questions come from
The questions come from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain bank of personality questions curated by the psychologist Lewis R. Goldberg. It exists precisely so that personality research can rely on instruments anyone is free to examine, rather than on proprietary questionnaires whose contents are not public.
The main part of the questionnaire derives from the IPIP-NEO-120 inventory developed by John A. Johnson (2014), which measures thirty facets of the five factors. Further questions come from other public scales in the same archive. Being in the public domain means they may be used freely, including commercially, without asking for any permission.
The Italian translation
The Italian translation of the 120 questions in the main inventory is not ours: it comes from the open-source project @bigfive-org/questions, released under the MIT licence, which makes them available in more than twenty languages. Using it, rather than translating from scratch, means adopting a version that is already published and open to scrutiny by others.
The questions in the remaining sections were translated by us, and those translations have not yet been reviewed by a professional: this is one of the limitations listed below. The original English wording of each is kept in our source code, so their provenance remains verifiable too.
The translation project is at github.com/rubynor/bigfive-web
Why public sources matter
A personality questionnaire whose questions are not public asks to be trusted: there is no way to check that it measures what it claims, or on what basis. With public-domain questions it is different — anyone can open the archive, read the original wording and check that it matches what was actually administered.
That applies to you as well: if you want to know where a question you answered comes from, the answer exists and can be shown. Every question in the questionnaire is linked to its corresponding entry in the source archive.
What this questionnaire does not do
A measurement instrument should also be judged by what it states it cannot do. In this case:
- it does not measure intelligence, technical skills, health or personal opinions;
- it does not make any decision on its own: it is one of the elements a person weighs alongside your CV and the interview;
- for some of the scales the score comes with a position relative to an international reference sample, not an Italian one: it tells you where you stand relative to that sample, not relative to Italian candidates. For the other scales no reference sample exists and no position is shown;
- the reference values for each scale are judgement thresholds, not yet verified against data on job performance.
Full references
Complete bibliographic citations, licences and the exact statement of which material comes from which source are in the project’s NOTICE.md file.