Personality survey: Definition, steps, questions and tips to follow

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Personality survey: Definition, steps, questions and tips to follow Personality survey
Table of Contents

What is a personality survey?

A personality survey is a survey that has questions with a purpose to gather information and insights on the respondent’s personality. The questions that are framed for a personality survey I’m mostly rating scales that collect the data to determine human behavior and decision-making process with the rationale behind it.

These survey questions are used by various survey software that brings out different personalities of the respondents. Such personality surveys will help you relate with people’s true feelings, deal with your problems, and understand your personality.

When we talk about a professional implementation of personality surveys we look at employee administration, decision making process of an organization, and understanding the employee engagement and the things that drive their passion. Organizations can also use personality surveys to determine how their customers think before buying a product, after using it, and while facing particular issues with the service.

Exploratory Research Guide

Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.

Personality survey questions

let’s take a look at some of the personality survey questions that you can commonly see in most of the personality surveys:

Questions for demographics 

  • What is your gender?
  • What is your highest education?
  • What is your marital status?
  • What ethnicity do you belong to?
  • What is your employment type?

Questions for personality

  • Are you comfortable with meeting new people?
  • Do you have a helping nature?
  • What will be your reaction when you are blamed for something you didn’t do?
  • How long does your anger last?
  • Do you have to face disappointment often?
  • Do you expect something in return when you help someone?
  • Do you plan for long term goals or short term goals?
  • How often do you participate in social gatherings?
  • Do you identify yourself as a considerate person for other people’s feelings?
  • Do you have a friendly nature?
  • How often do you travel?
  • How do you identify yourself as: an introvert or an extrovert?
  • How often do you feel overwhelmed?
  • Do you have a heart to always see good in people in any situation?
  • Do you like being bossy?

Steps to design a good personality survey

  • Define the objective -it is important to define the objective of your survey even before you start framing one.  you need to understand why you are conducting this survey and how you are going to conduct it. This helps you derive reasonable insights and actionable plans from the data collection.
  • Right questions – a survey will be able to bring you quality if you free the right questions. Now that you have your objective for the survey, you need to frame questions that are relevant to the topic, easy to understand, simple words, and limited to the length of this survey. Right question is the path to collecting the right data.
  • Survey flow – when we talk about service, especially online surveys, where you do not have much control over these respondents actions, you can face survey abandonment issues. where the respondents tend to leave the survey or fill it with rubbish answers. This happens when they feel that the questions are not relevant to them or they are too hard to decode. In this situation it is always advised to build the survey flow in such a way that every question makes sense and has a relevance to the topic and knowledge of the respondent.
  • Mock surveys – this is a best practice to carry out even before you distribute the survey to the target audience. You can run this survey through your colleagues’ friends just to see how the survey appeals to the audience and then make necessary changes in the questions accordingly.
  • Analyze responses – once you deliver the service to the target audience and they have filled it and sent it back, you will have a lot of data to analyze and derive information and insights from. Using proper data analysis tools can help you save the cost and time that goes behind making sense of all the data and give you statistical and graphical explanations on the personality of the respondents.

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

Points to remember while designing a good personality survey

  • Make sure you ask unbiased questions. The way you frame your questions should not influence the answer that the respondent wants to give.
  • Make sure to be respectful with your questions. Respondents tend to drop out the survey if they feel personally attacked through the questions.
  • Keep the answer options consistent and convenient. As the nature of personality surveys is inclined more towards writing skills, you need to pay attention to how you divide these skills from lowest to the highest entity keeping in mind that you are giving all the possible options for the respondents to answer.
  • You can keep personal questions optional. As it is a personality survey there can be some questions you have framed that directly point towards a person’s personality that he may not be comfortable to share with you. you can make these types of questions optional so that the respondents can choose or rather they want to answer it or not.
  • Keep the size of your survey short. respondents tend to stick to a particular survey for only 5 to 10 minutes. After that there are high chances of them dropout rates increasing with the increase in the size of the survey. include limited questions that our fixated on the topic and nothing else.

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