Personality Assessment To-Go

A particular feature of unproctored Internet Testing (UIT) is the participants’ freedom to decide on the formal aspects of their participation, such as time of day, device, and whether, how often, and for how long they might intermit their participation. A main point of discussion has been how these aspects alter the quality and content of an assessment. The issue remains understudied while simultaneously maintaining great importance for many fields. We examined this question in a UIT assessment of the Big Five personality factors in the present study. A sample of 441 participants who completed the assessment and 527 participants who aborted their participation was used to analyze quality (internal consistency, response styles) and content (mean score) differences. Results revealed several dependencies among small effect sizes. The discussion focuses on the potential practical implications of the present findings.