Adjectives vs. Statements in Forced Choice and Likert Item Types: Which Is More Resistant to Impression Management in Personality Assessment?

Abstract

Our objective was to compare individuals’ ability to intentionally make a positive impression when responding to a Five-Factor Model personality measure under adjective vs. statement and forced choice vs. Likert conditions. Participants were 1,798 high school students who were randomly assigned to either a condition receiving normal instructions or instructions to make a positive impression. We compared the groups’ scores and validity estimates under the various conditions. Although impression management occurred on all item types, participants could more easily manipulate their responses to Likert items vs. forced choice items, and statements vs. adjectives. Item type made little difference in terms of convergent and discriminant validity and criterion-related validity for all outcomes but one, ACT scores, which suggests cognitive ability plays a role in impression management ability.

Data sharing

Data from this study cannot be shared because a) they are proprietary and b) participants were not informed we would be sharing their data, therefore we do not have their consent to do so.

Notes

1 Viswesvaran and Ones (1999) referred to this as “faking good” and “faking bad.” Given the pejorative nature of “faking,” we prefer to use verbiage related to impression management or response distortion (see Burchett & Bagby, 2014, for a review additional types of content-based invalid responding). We do this in our discussion of Viswesvaran and Ones’s work, as well as throughout the rest of the literature review and manuscript.