The International Personality Item Pool, or IPIP, is a public-domain collection of personality and related questionnaire items created by Lewis Goldberg and colleagues and hosted by the Oregon Research Institute. It contains thousands of items that anyone can use freely, without paying licence fees.
Why was it created?
Many well-known personality tests are copyrighted and expensive, which slows down research and makes it hard for students and small teams to study personality. The IPIP was set up so that researchers around the world could share items, build their own scales and compare results openly.
What can you find in it?
The pool includes items for the Big Five, detailed 30-facet inventories, and scales designed to represent constructs from other well-known tools, for example measures of locus of control, emotional intelligence, character strengths and sensation seeking. "Representation" scales use public-domain items to measure similar ideas; they are not the original commercial tests.
Is it scientifically credible?
Yes. Many IPIP scales have been studied in published research, and some correlate strongly with the commercial instruments they were modelled on. Quality still varies by scale, and some scales have very few items and should be read as indicative only.
IPIP tests on PsiQ
PsiQ offers dozens of IPIP-based scales, each with its source and limitations shown. Popular starting points are the Big Five test, the emotional intelligence test and the character strengths test. Every question is available in English, Hindi and Hinglish.