IPIP AND PERSONALITY

From personnel recruitment to clinical research, the use of personality assessment in a variety of setting has been growing rapidly over the past century. Given such widespread usage, it is important that new and up-to-date inventories are developed constantly to replace those that are out of time. However, the progress towards the development of personality inventories has been dismally slow,as described by Goldberg (1999). Goldberg argues that this lack of progress is perhaps due to the fact that most existing personality assessment inventories are proprietary and copyrighted, and users are charged for every questionnaire used. He argues that this restriction may hamper some personality research, as not all researchers are equally affluent in research funds. In hope to relieve researchers from such constrainment, Goldberg thus came up with an idea to place a collection of personality items in the public domain, which can be assessed by researchers worldwide at no cost at all. So is the birth of International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). Initially starting with 1252 items, the number of IPIP items has doubled itself over the years. It has well over 2500 items now, and new items sets are carefully examined and added to it every year (Zheng et al., 2008). Since its inception, IPIP items have been used in constructing new personality scales and also proxies for famous commercial inventories such as 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) (Conn & Rieke, 1994), NEO-PI-R(Costa & McCrae, 1992),and Six-Factor Personality Questionnaire (6 FPQ) (Jackson, Paunonen & Tremblay, 2000) , thus providing researcher a cost-free and accessible alternative to these inventories. At this moment, over 300 scales have been constructed using the IPIP items (Goldberg et al., 2006). All of these scales and the reports of studies using these scales are accessible at IPIP official website, http://ipip.ori.org.

IPIP AND PERSONALITY

Out of these hundreds of scales, the IPIP Big-Five markers (hereafter abbreviated as IPIP-FFM) was chosen to be used in this study. The IPIP-FFM measures five dimensions of personality, namely Extraversion (E), Agreeableness(A), Conscientiousness(C), Emotional Stability(ES) and also Intellect(I).To explain in brief, E refers the need for an individual to engage with external world, while A reflects how much one values social harmony and the extent to which they are helpful, amiable and cooperative. C is related to ones ability to manage their impulsive drives and be effective. Last but not least, I refers to the extent to which one is intellectually curious, nonconforming This article is divided into two parts. The first part is a descriptive analysis of my personality assessed using the 50 items IPIP big-five markers, while the second part is a critical analysis of the potential usefulness of IPIP as a research tool, how it may help to accelerate progress in personality research field, and lastly, the potential problems it has as a research tool . High agreeableness People with low agreeableness should not be regard as arrogant, they just do not go with the flow They can make good leaders and decision makers, as they are not usually I found this be matching When I first got the result, it really surprises me, as I have always regards myself as a organized person. However, as I start to think of it, I realized that there might be some truth in that result. My notebook is always flooded by to-do-lists, deadlines and also appointment dates, but I do not follow them thoroughly. I make plans.There are times that I almost miss the deadlines of submitting my assignments, just because I could not adhere to the timeline set to finish my assignments and wasted my time doing unproductive activities. Or when something bad happens, I would waste my time I think this is also partially influenced by my high

IPIP AND PERSONALITY

intellectuality. As mentioned earlier in this article,I am a person who enjoys toying with novel ideas. In short,IPIP-FFM has provided me with novel insights into my personality. Since its conception in 1996, IPIP has sparked substantial debate regarding its potential usefulness in personality research. However, despite the qualms, peoples interest in IPIP as a research tool have been increasing year by year.As of now,there is already a growing body of research Firstly, IPIP is free. For acclaimed researchers holding large amount of research funds at large universities and institutions, the cost of purchasing commercial inventory may only be a penny. But it is not so for researchers, at smaller universities and colleges. The cost of using a commercial inventory might be burdensome for researchers with limited research funds. IPIP, as a free resource in public domain, provided researchers with limited funds a chance to conduct large sample studies and gain a foothold in the research community. This helps to level the playing fields between researchers that are financially affluent and those who are not. A second appealing attribute of IPIP is the speed and ease with which its items and scales can be acquired. With commercial inventory, users often have to go through a long and tedious application process to obtain permissions to use the inventory for their research .They have to send in formal application letters to the inventory publisher, attached with documents to prove their identity and their qualification to use the inventory. After the publishers had verified the users identity and qualification, extra time is consumed for them to ship the inventories to the user. With IPIP, all that waiting time can be eliminated. All IPIP items and scales are within ones fingertips as long as one have access to the internet. With that,research can be done Although this instant retrievability might seems like a blessing from the users perspective, it

IPIP AND PERSONALITY

could well be a double-edged sword. The IPIP website does not contain detailed instructions on how to assemble items into Next, as a public domain resource, IPIP scales offer researchers a degree of flexibility that was not possible with traditional commercial inventories. Researchers can add or remove items from any IPIP scale according to their need. They can change the order of Although it may sounds like a boon, but this freedom to fiddle with the IPIP scale have its share of drawbacks. For example, the IPIP-FFM are sometimes wrongly labeled the IPIP-NEO(IPIP FFM is available in 50-items format and also 100-items format,while IPIP-NEO is also available in 50 items format and 100-items format). Unrestricted modification of IPIP scales cause the results of studies using different version of This might indicates that IPIP has grown to a point that it is starting to need some sort of regulation from the authority. How strict should the regulations should be when it concerns the management of IPIP? This question clearly a challenge to the wisdom management team of IPIP Too strict of rules will cause IPIP to follow the footsteps of its commercial counterparts and become just another hard-to-access resource. Contrariwise will cause the IPIP scales to evolve in unforeseeable ways, that will undermine their credibility as . In short, one cannot deny the contributions IPIP has brought to the field of personality research, but neither can one deny that problems that IPIP has as a research tool. The issue highlighted in this article must not be overlooked if IPIP were to go further as a research tool. At the end of the day, it may be still premature to call IPIP an equivalent alternative for the traditional commercial inventories. Whether or not IPIP can indeed grow become a viable complement to commercial personality inventories in the future, only time and further research will tell.

IPIP AND PERSONALITY