Personality Inventories

Personality inventories describe not a symptom level but the tendencies that repeat consistently across situations. A personality test therefore does not return a “high” or “low” result; it returns a profile. The Big Five inventory measures personality along extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience, and rests on the broadest research base in the field. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire offers a comparable frame across fewer core dimensions. The DISC assessment describes behavioural and communication style in a work and team context. The Enneagram looks at motivation and defensive tendencies through nine typological patterns. The borderline personality features test stands apart from the others: it is a clinical screening instrument that assesses where personality features make functioning harder.

A personality profile helps establish a shared language in therapy planning and in counselling: the same intervention can produce very different results in two clients with different personality patterns. It is worth remembering that typology-based tools serve self-awareness and development, and are not used to diagnose psychopathology. The pages below explain which dimensions each inventory measures, how many items it contains and how its profile is read.