Personality Survey Questions: Definition
A personality survey is defined as survey that consists of multiple question types that aim to collect insights into the personality of a respondent. This survey is mostly introspective that measures life reports in the form of rating scales by using a questionnaire. The data collection from a personality survey provides insights into a human-being and the decision making process as well as the rationale behind that process.
These survey questions are used in the survey software to help distinguish ability from personality. It primarily helps to understand how you relate with others feelings, approach your problems, deal with feelings and understand your personality.
Personality surveys have uses in multiple fields but the primary use is in a professional environment where a prospective employee is administered this online survey to gauge temperament, decision making process, business acumen etc. It helps in understanding how motivated and driven and employee is and the factors that drive the individual.
The other times a personality survey is used to self-introspect, to match compatibility, assess theories, evaluate change in a person after a certain process, diagnosing psychological problems, student evaluation and also sometimes in forensic settings.
Learn more: Personality Survey Questions + Sample Questionnaire Template
Top 25 questions to ask in your personality survey
The key to getting accurate responses and a good survey response rate is the survey design. The survey platform consists of an online survey with multiple question types. The personality survey can be broken down into 2 major sections, the demographic survey and the core question survey.
Personality survey questions for demographic assessment
The demographic survey questions one of the most important aspects of the personality survey in a questionnaire since they help profile the respondents and in turn help understand how different sets of people have different personalities. Some of the most important demographic questions are:
- Please select your gender for the survey
- What is your highest education completed?
- What is your marital status?
- What is your ethnicity?
- Please select your employment type
Survey questions for personality evaluation
These survey questions are a deep-dive into the personality traits of an individual. The questions in this section are set-up to understand how a certain individual behaves, the decision making process and their temperament.
- Do you like meeting new people?
- Do you like helping people out?
- What do you if you have been unjustly blamed for something you didn’t do?
- How long does it take you to calm down when you’ve been angry?
- Are you easily disappointed?
- Do you help people only if you think you’d get something in return?
- Do you set up long term goals?
- Are you easily fazed?
- How often do you go out into a social environment or a public place?
- Are you considerate of other people’s feelings?
- Are you always busy?
- Do you like solving complex problems?
- Do you make people feel welcome?
- Is your go-to reaction in a problem to cheat your way out of it?
- Do you feel overwhelmed often?
- How often do you travel?
- Do you prefer familiarity over unfamiliarity?
- Are you generally passionate about social causes?
- Do you like being pushy?
- Do you tend to always see the good in people, no matter what the circumstance is?
5 steps to design a good personality survey
A personality survey is effective only when set-up right. It is important to have the survey collect the insights that you need to gauge the respondent in the manner that’s most effective to you. Hence, the survey design is extremely important. The 5 steps to designing a good personality survey, are:
- Define the survey objective: It is imperative to define the survey objective before creating the survey or deploying it to potential respondents. The “why” and “how” is important to be put in place before beginning the study. This ensures that actionable insights can be derived from the data collection.
- Ask the right questions: To get a good survey response rate and to collect deep level personality insights, it is important that the right questions are asked in the survey. This helps the researcher collect personality information about a person or a set of people. This is mainly important when a new employee is being on boarded or is being considered for a promotion or role hike.
- Build the survey flow: Most respondents drop out of a survey as the questions if the survey questions are not relevant to them. This makes it very important to effectively use survey skip logic and branching so the preceding answer defines the next question displayed to a survey taker.
- Take the survey for a spin! Before the survey is deployed or administered to potential respondents, it needs to be thoroughly tested. This is to ensure that the survey renders properly and the logic of the survey is correctly developed.
- Analyze and report the survey responses: The data collection is only half of the survey objective. Analyzing and reporting those responses is the other important part of the data collection. Analysis helps draw trend lines and parallels between personalities and how certain people react under certain circumstances.
Tips for a good personality survey
Listed below are some tips for a good personality survey:
- Ask unbiased questions: When you design a survey, make sure that the survey questions are unbiased. Driving respondents towards responding in a certain manner skews the survey results.
- Be respectful with your questions: In a personality survey, it is very important to be respectful with questions. If respondents feel personally attacked with survey questions, it increases the survey dropout rate.
- Keep consistent answer options: If the answer options of a survey in the survey software aren’t uniform, it may confuse the respondents and the survey results could subsequently get skewed. Hence, it is important to have consistent answer options in the survey.
- Keep questions optional: Due to the nature of the personality survey, complex or personal questions could form the basis of the survey. It is therefore important to allow the respondents the flexibility to skip questions or they would feel uncomfortable continuing and subsequently drop out of the survey.
- Keep the survey short: A personality survey could consist of hundreds of questions. But it is important that the most important personality questions are asked and the survey is kept short. This is to ensure there is a high survey completion rate.
