Method

What this is

Forty-one questions and two short lines you write yourself. Twenty-eight read your position on four axes, seven questions per axis. Each axis runs between two opposite ends, such as Challenger and Stabilizer. Eleven read where you are in your own search: whether you have committed to a direction, whether you actually weighed others, whether your thinking reaches an answer, and how much you are carrying right now. Two are pilot questions for the next version. Once enough answers are stored, they are how that version gets tested on real answers. Partway through, you name the main thing you are doing right now in a few words, and some of the later questions ask about it by name. If you choose "Nothing right now" there instead, those eleven questions and the two pilots are skipped, and your state is set to the Coast by rule: having no main thing right now is read as coasting.

Two of those eleven ask how much energy you have right now, because how loaded you are changes how a reading should be written.

The output is a position on four axes and a state you are currently in. Your name, one of sixteen, is read from where you sit on the four axes. Everybody is a position, and some positions are close to the line.

Where the four axes come from

Each axis starts from a distinction in published research. The research is established; what each axis measures is narrower than the research it starts from, and the wording of the questions is ours.

Challenger / Stabilizer

Regulatory focus theory distinguishes two motivational systems. A promotion focus regulates toward growth and ideals, and reads outcomes as gains present or absent. A prevention focus regulates toward safety and obligation, and reads the same outcomes as losses present or absent. They are separate systems rather than two ends of one pleasure scale, which is why a question about what you gained is not simply the reverse of a question about what you lost. On this axis, every question asks you to lean one way, so what it reads is which of the two leads for you, and by how far.

Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American Psychologist, 52(12), 1280–1300.

Higgins, E. T. (1998). Promotion and prevention: Regulatory focus as a motivational principle. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 1–46.

Seen / Self-sufficient

Self-determination research separates two kinds of life aspiration. Extrinsic ones are chiefly wealth, fame, and image. Intrinsic ones are chiefly personal growth, close relationships, and contributing to a community. This axis takes a narrower slice. Its questions ask whether your own work keeps its worth when nobody sees it, nobody credits you for it, and nobody tells you it was good. That slice sits near the research's line around fame and image, narrowed to your own work. The axis runs between work whose worth waits on a response and work whose worth stands on its own.

Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1996). Further examining the American dream. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), 280–287.

Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2009). The path taken: Consequences of attaining intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations in post-college life. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 291–306.

World / Self

Schwartz's value theory arranges basic human values in a circle, where adjacent values are compatible and opposite ones conflict. Self-transcendence and self-enhancement sit opposite each other. Self-transcendence covers universalism and benevolence. Self-enhancement covers achievement and power, and on that side the questions here ask about achievement alone. Opposition in that circle is literal. Pursuing both at full strength produces real internal conflict, and a question with a pole at each end is a good way to find out which side wins when you cannot have both.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).

Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., et al. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663–688.

Arrive / Process

Achievement goal theory separates mastery goals from performance goals. In the later two-by-two version, a mastery goal judges success against the task or against your own earlier level, and a performance goal judges it against other people. The axis draws its own line. Its questions ask whether success, for you, is a finished result you can point to and then stop, or an activity you stay inside and keep getting better at. The process end overlaps with mastery where the questions ask about getting better than you were. The arrive end is about your own finished result.

Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040–1048.

Elliot, A. J., & McGregor, H. A. (2001). A 2 × 2 achievement goal framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3), 501–519.

Where the state comes from

The four axes describe what you are aimed at. The state reads whether you are moving, from a different literature.

Identity status research crosses two things: whether you have explored alternatives, and whether you have committed to one. The original four positions are achievement, foreclosure, moratorium, and diffusion. Two later refinements are what make the read usable.

The first is that exploration has a quality. Some exploration converges and some does not. Ruminative exploration is the kind that keeps generating options without ever closing any, and it looks like searching from the outside while feeling like paralysis from the inside. The instrument separates these with three questions about whether your deliberation closes: whether a made decision stays made, whether an open question can be set down, whether thinking moves toward an answer.

The second is that identity gets settled more than once. People move out of a commitment and back into searching, repeatedly, across a life. A position settled at twenty-five can open again, and the research names this pattern directly.

Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551–558.

Stephen, J., Fraser, E., & Marcia, J. E. (1992). Moratorium-achievement (MAMA) cycles in lifespan identity development. Journal of Adolescence, 15(3), 283–300.

Crocetti, E., Rubini, M., & Meeus, W. (2008). Capturing the dynamics of identity formation in various ethnic groups. Journal of Adolescence, 31(2), 207–222.

Luyckx, K., Schwartz, S. J., Berzonsky, M. D., et al. (2008). Capturing ruminative exploration: Extending the four-dimensional model of identity formation in late adolescence. Journal of Research in Personality, 42(1), 58–82.

Why the questions look like that

Every question is a sentence with a blank; in one pilot the sentence is a question and the blank is its answer. Two completions sit below it, and under them four circles: the two in the middle lean a little, the two at the edges lean a lot. The circle you tap writes its side into the blank, so you read your own answer as a full sentence, and a second tap on the same circle confirms it. Four positions, every one a lean.

Underneath, that is a four-point scale between two opposed statements. The format comes from Osgood's work on measuring meaning by position between opposed terms rather than by agreement with a single statement.

Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The Measurement of Meaning. University of Illinois Press.

Two things about it matter for a product answered in English by people from everywhere.

Every answer here takes a side. On a five or seven point agreement scale, the middle is where ambivalence, boredom, and caution all pile up, and afterward they all look the same.

Comparing two statements is also built against habit. How strongly people use the ends of a scale varies by culture in ways that have nothing to do with what is being measured, and saying which of two things is more true of you is a relative answer, not an absolute one. The circles still ask how far you lean, so a habit of tapping the edges still moves the score.

One more property. Here both ends belong to the same axis, so the scores stay comparable across people. Forced-choice formats lose that when the two options belong to different traits. The research behind Challenger / Stabilizer treats promotion and prevention as two separate systems, but this axis scores them as the two ends of one line and reads which of the two leads for you, and by how far.

The questions and the result

Our questions are original. We wrote every one from scratch, for Path of Living.

Reliability comes with the answers. The trait axes carry seven questions each, which is inside the range research instruments use; the state groups carry two or three each. When enough people have answered for the numbers to mean something, we will compute reliability and publish it, whatever it shows. The two unscored pilot questions are part of that promise: they are how the next revision gets tested on real answers.

The result makes a case. You judge it. It is our reading of your answers. We wrote it specific enough to check against your own life, line by line.

Questions and corrections about the method go to support@udefed.com.