“To Be” or “I Am Someone Who Tends to Be”: Does the Wording of Personality Items Matter?

The fundamental unit of data collection for self- and informant-report personality research is the item. In personality structure research, items have historically taken the form of single-word trait descriptors (e.g., “Calm”) while, in most personality assessment frameworks, they consist of phrases and sentences (e.g., “I see myself as someone who tends to be calm”). This Registered Report used a randomized, longitudinal design to evaluate the effects of differences in item wording on how people respond to personality measures. Specifically, we examined the effect of four item formats—trait-descriptive adjectives presented alone (e.g., “Talkative”), with the linking verb “am” (e.g., “Am talkative”), with the additional verb “tend” (e.g., “Tend to be talkative”), and with the additional indefinite pronoun “someone” (e.g., “See myself as someone who tends to be talkative”)—on how people respond to an adjective-based measure of the Big Five (i.e., the Midlife Development Inventory; Lachman & Weaver, 1997). With few exceptions, the findings indicated that item format had little effect on item means, extreme responding, acquiescent responding, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and participants’ subjective experiences completing the survey. That said, participants responded to shorter item formats (e.g., adjectives presented alone) faster than longer item formats (e.g., adjectives presented with “See myself as someone who tends to be”), especially when they were accompanied by the personal pronoun “I” (e.g., “I am talkative” versus “Am talkative”). The findings from this work have implications for ongoing research related to personality structure and assessment, including the development of more detailed taxonomies of personality, the creation of more generalizable assessment models, and the harmonization of existing assessment models.