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Massive Questionnaires for Personality Capture

National Science Foundation, william.bainbridge{at}verizon.net

Contemporary information technology facilitates the creation and administration of much longer questionnaires than was feasible traditionally. People might be motivated to respond to these questionnaires as a means of capturing significant aspects of their personalities, and this can be useful when designing sociable technology—computer avatars, software agents, and robots with simulated personalities—and when creating personality archives for research or memorial purposes. In this article, the author illustrates how "personality capture" can be accomplished through 20,000 questionnaire items culled from responses to open-ended online questions, content analysis of existing verbal or textual material, and words from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and thesauri. This approach enables detailed idiographic study of a single individual, based on fresh measurement items and scales derived from the ambient culture.

Key Words: personality capture • Survey2000 • Survey2001 • survey research • opinion research • questionnaire • software

Social Science Computer Review, Vol. 21, No. 3, 267-280 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0894439303253973


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