The Big Five personality test
Fifty short statements. For each one, say how accurately it describes you. There are no right answers and no good or bad scores. Each of the five traits is a spectrum, and both ends of every one come with real strengths.
Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex as you are, and roughly your same age.
What the five traits are
- Extraversion, where your energy comes from
- Agreeableness, how you orient toward other people
- Conscientiousness, how you approach order and follow-through
- Emotional Stability, how reactive you are to stress
- Openness to Experience, how you meet ideas and novelty
Where these questions come from
The fifty statements are the IPIP-50, from the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain set of items developed for research and used in a great many published studies. We did not write them and we do not own them, which is precisely why we can offer them to you for nothing.
We score the fourth trait as Emotional Stability, the way the source publishes it. You may see it called Neuroticism elsewhere; that is the same thing measured in the opposite direction.
What happens to your answers
The questions are scored in your browser. At the end we ask for your name and email address so we can send you the results, and we keep a copy along with your answers. You are shown exactly what you are agreeing to before that happens.
There is no account to create and no password. Your results are kept under a code that only you are given, so you can open them again later. We do not sell your information and we do not share it outside the practice.
We only send you email about counseling services if you tick the separate box asking for it. Getting your results does not require agreeing to hear from us. See our privacy policy for the full picture.
This is not a diagnosis
A personality questionnaire describes tendencies. It cannot tell you whether something is wrong, and it is not a screening tool for anything. If what you read here raises something worth talking about, reach out to one of our counselors. That is what we do.