Gamifying a personality measure by converting it into a story: Convergence, incremental prediction, faking, and reactions

Abstract

AbstractNew assessments were developed measuring conscientiousness and openness by gamifying two existing Likert‐type personality measures by adding a story, a measure redesign process called storification. Both the original and storified versions of the measures were administered to 426 people to compare the measures' convergence, incremental prediction of performance, magnitude of faking effects, and reactions using a counter‐balanced within‐subjects fake‐good research design. Moderate convergence of latent traits was observed between the original and storified measures for both conscientiousness (β = .45) and openness (β = .72). Convergence at the item level was generally poor (−.02 < r < .40 with mean convergence = 0.17). The measures predicted performance more poorly than the original measures on which they were based. When instructed to fake, the conscientiousness measure showed improved resistance to faking, but the openness measure did not. Reactions (e.g., face validity perceptions, predictive validity perceptions) were more positive to the storified measures in terms of procedural justice and general fairness perceptions. Overall, the present attempt at storification was more successful at creating alternative measures of traits rather than parallel ones, suggesting storification may be better considered a distinct scale development strategy instead of a redesign technique that maintains the psychometric profile of an original measure.