If you’ve ever taken a personality quiz online – one of those “Which Harry Potter character are you?” tests, or a viral “What does your favorite color say about you?” quiz – you’ve engaged with something that looks like psychological assessment but isn’t. These quizzes are entertainment. They have no scientific basis, no validated psychometric properties, and no meaningful relationship to actual personality theory.
The problem is that real personality assessment does exist, and it’s extraordinarily well-researched. The Big Five model of personality – measuring Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism – is one of the most robustly supported frameworks in all of psychology. Decades of research, across cultures and languages, have established it as a reliable and valid way to describe the fundamental dimensions of human personality.
But here’s the catch: many of the best instruments for measuring the Big Five are proprietary. They’re locked behind paywalls. And that creates a real barrier – for researchers, for students, and for anyone who wants to engage with serious personality science.
The Case for Open-Source Items
This is where the International Personality Item Pool comes in. The IPIP is a public-domain collection of personality items developed by Lewis Goldberg and maintained by the Oregon Research Institute. Anyone can use them. Anyone can adapt them. Anyone can build with them.
Why does this matter? Because accessibility changes everything.
When a widely-used instrument like the NEO-PI-R sits behind a paywall, not every researcher can afford access. Not every university in every country has the budget to license it. And even when the cost is modest by Western standards, for researchers in countries like Georgia, it’s an unnecessary barrier. Why should science be gated by price when equally valid alternatives exist in the public domain?
Of course, you can sometimes contact the authors of proprietary instruments and ask for permission to use their items. Most will agree. But it takes time – emails back and forth, waiting for responses, navigating licensing terms. In a small number of cases, authors decline. The process adds friction to research that simply doesn’t need to be there.
The IPIP removes all of that friction. The items are freely available, well-documented, and backed by extensive psychometric evidence. The 60-item version – the IPIP-NEO-60 – provides reliable measurement of all five Big Five domains with just 12 items per factor. It’s the instrument that was used in Kosinski’s landmark Facebook likes and personality study, and it has been deployed in countless other research projects worldwide.
Open items mean open science. And open science means better science.
Why I Built the IPIP-60 Georgian App
I’m a strong believer in open science, and when I looked at what was available for personality assessment in Georgian, the answer was: very little. There was no freely accessible, scientifically grounded personality assessment tool that Georgian speakers could use to get instant, meaningful results about their personality profile.
So I built one.
The IPIP-60 Georgian app is a bilingual R Shiny application that lets anyone take the 60-item Big Five personality inventory in either Georgian or English. You answer 60 questions, and within seconds, you receive a complete personality profile – a radar chart showing your scores across all five domains, along with detailed descriptions of what your score level means for each factor.
There were two main reasons I wanted to build this as an interactive app rather than just distributing a paper questionnaire or a Google Form.
First, immediacy. All calculations are done automatically. The moment you finish the last item, your results appear – a visual profile with scores and interpretations. No waiting for someone to score it manually, no downloading a scoring key, no ambiguity. You see your personality profile in seconds.
Second, demonstration. The app is built in R and R Shiny, and part of its purpose is to showcase what’s possible with these tools. Many people in the field – students, researchers, even practicing psychologists – don’t realize that R can be used to build interactive, user-facing applications. They think of R as something you run in a console to analyze data. Seeing an actual working app that delivers real-time psychometric results changes that perception. It opens people’s minds to what they could build themselves.
What the App Does
The app presents 60 items across five steps – 12 items per step, one domain at a time. Users respond on a 5-point Likert scale. Reverse-scored items are handled automatically. Once all items are completed, the app calculates domain scores and generates an interactive radar chart using Plotly, displaying the user’s profile across the five factors.
Below the chart, users receive written interpretations for each domain. These aren’t generic one-liners – they’re detailed, three-level descriptions (low, average, and high) grounded in personality theory. Each description explains what it actually means to score at that level on that factor, including both strengths and potential challenges. All descriptions are available in both Georgian and English.
The app also includes a dark mode toggle, a language switcher, and – importantly – an export feature. Since the app doesn’t store any data and resets when you close your browser tab, I wanted to give users a way to save their results. The export function generates a standalone HTML file containing the user’s radar chart and interpretations, which they can download, keep, or share with others.
The entire application uses a Solarized color scheme, consistent with the rest of Psycholo.ge.
A Note on Validation
It’s important to be transparent about the current status of the Georgian version. The items have been adapted into Georgian, but the scale has not yet been fully standardized on a broad population sample. The adaptation was conducted with university students, which means the norms and score interpretations are preliminary.
This is not a diagnostic tool. It’s an educational and self-exploration tool that uses a scientifically validated framework and item set. The descriptions are based on established personality theory – what it means, in general terms, to score high, average, or low on each of the Big Five dimensions.
I am planning a broader validation study using a more representative Georgian sample, collected through LimeSurvey, to properly standardize and norm the scale. Once that work is complete, the app’s scoring and interpretation thresholds will be adjusted accordingly. But even in its current form, the instrument is far more scientifically grounded than the vast majority of personality tests available online.
Why This Matters Beyond Georgia
Every language deserves validated psychological instruments. When a scale exists only in English, or in a handful of major languages, entire populations are excluded from the research literature. Cross-cultural psychology can only advance if we have measurement tools that work across cultures – and that requires adaptation, not just translation.
If you’re a researcher in another country considering adapting the IPIP-60 to your language, I would strongly encourage it. Follow strict psychometric procedures – proper translation and back-translation, pilot testing, factor analysis, reliability assessment. The IPIP items are freely available, so the only cost is the work itself.
And if you’re considering building an app like this one – do it. It’s a wonderful showcase for students and anyone else interested in how psychological assessment actually works. It demonstrates that personality measurement can be rigorous, transparent, and accessible all at once. And it gives people an experience of genuine psychological science, as opposed to the pseudoscientific questionnaires that flood the internet.
Because that’s ultimately what this is about. There are countless personality quizzes online that have no scientific basis whatsoever. They look professional, they give you confident-sounding results, and they mean nothing. The IPIP-60 is the opposite: it’s backed by decades of research, it’s free, it’s open, and it actually measures what it claims to measure.
Science should be accessible. Assessment should be valid. And good tools should be free.
You can try the IPIP-60 Georgian app here: psychologe.shinyapps.io/IPIP-60_Geo
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Giorgi Tchumburidze
April 2026