The use of forced-choice instruments in personality assessment spans several decades (see review by Brown, 2015). These assessments present items with two or more options and instruct respondents to select among these options. For example, respondents may be asked to decide which of two adjectives—“hard-working” or “friendly”—more appropriately describes themselves. This format differentiates itself from single-stimulus items, in which respondents may be asked to rate themselves on each of the aforementioned adjectives on a Likert-type scale, for instance. One early example of forced-choice personality assessment is the Gordon Personal Profile (Gordon, 1953), which presents items in sets of four brief self-descriptive statements and requires respondents to select one statement that is most like them and one that is least like them. This assessment generates four subscale scores —Ascendancy, Responsibility, Emotional Stability, and Sociability—which are also combined into a total score. Other examples of forced-choice personality assessments include the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979), the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI, Myers, McCaulley, Quenk, & Hammer, 1998), and the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ; SHL, 2006). Some situational judgment tests (SJTs; see Weekley & Ployhart, 2006) also incorporate forced-choice assessment.
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