Where the questions come from, and how much to trust the result

The statements in this test are not ours. They are a published, public-domain instrument with peer-reviewed psychometrics. This page says exactly which one, how it maps onto DISC, how the scoring works, and what it cannot tell you.

The questions

All 32 statements are the IPIP Interpersonal Circumplex, taken verbatim from the International Personality Item Pool at ipip.ori.org. The scale was assembled by Markey and Markey and published in Assessment in 2009. IPIP items are in the public domain, so they can be used and reproduced freely.

The wording is unchanged and the order is the published administration order. That matters: the reliability and structure figures below were measured on this exact wording. Reword an item and the evidence no longer applies to it.

Eight scales, four statements each. The response scale is the standard IPIP one, from "very inaccurate" to "very accurate", with the standard instruction to describe yourself as you generally are now.

Why an interpersonal circumplex test is a DISC test

DISC arranges behaviour on a circle with two axes. So does the interpersonal circumplex, a model that has been studied in academic psychology since Leary in 1957 and Wiggins in 1979. The two axes there are dominance, running from assertive to submissive, and warmth, running from cold to warm.

These are the same circle. Wiley's own research on Everything DiSC correlates its scales with the NEO PI-R and the 16PF, and the pattern that comes back is dominance and warmth. Three separate studies comparing DISC with the Big Five reach the same conclusion: the four DISC dimensions are blends of Extraversion and Agreeableness, which are the Big Five's names for the same two axes.

So the eight IPIP-IPC octants sit at exactly the eight positions the DISC circle needs, and each one carries a DISC label here:

One honest consequence of using a real instrument: two of the octants are unflattering by design. The published names are "Arrogant-Calculating" and "Cold-Hearted", and the items say things like "cut others to pieces" and "am not interested in other people's problems". Commercial DISC products word that whole side of the circle more gently. Fewer people agree with a blunt item than with a flattering one, so expect the left side of your profile to sit lower than a commercial DISC report would put it.

What the research says about these items

The largest published evaluation used 2,741 respondents. Internal consistency by octant, and the fit of the circular model:

Read those octant numbers as a warning. Four items cannot measure anything precisely, and the original authors report average composite reliabilities around .60 to .64 across their four studies. A single octant score on your result page is a rough reading. The two axis scores are not, because each one pools all eight octants, and that is why the results page puts them first.

The circular structure itself holds up very well. The correspondence index is .910, meaning 275 of 288 predicted relationships between octants came out in the right order. Fitting the model with the circumplex angles imposed gives RMSEA .026 and CFI 1.000. In plain terms: the eight scales really do sit around a circle in the order the model says.

How your answers become a position

This is the Structural Summary Method, the standard way circumplex data is reduced.

1. Average the four items in each octant. That is the octant score, from 1 to 5.
2. Average all eight octant scores. That is your elevation, and it is reported on your results page. It reflects how high you rate yourself in general rather than which style you are.
3. Subtract elevation from each octant. This removes the tendency to agree, or disagree, with everything. What is left is where you sit relative to your own average.
4. Project those eight numbers onto the two axes. Warmth is the sum of each score times the cosine of its angle; dominance is the same with the sine. Both are divided by four, the convention for eight octants, which keeps them in the same units as the octant scores.
5. Amplitude is the length of the resulting vector and sets how far your dot sits from the middle. Displacement is its direction and picks your style from twelve 30-degree sectors.
6. Profile fit is the R-squared of a single cosine curve through your eight octant scores. High means one style really does describe you. Low means your answers do not form a clean circular pattern and the style name is a poor summary, so the segment table is the more honest read.

The wheel is full at an amplitude of 2.25. The absolute ceiling is 2.61, which needs one half of the circle answered "very accurate" and the other half "very inaccurate". Against a simulated population, 2.25 puts about one percent of people on the rim, so the range gets used without flattening everyone distinctive onto the edge.

What this cannot tell you

• No norm group. Commercial instruments compare your score with a reference sample. No reference sample has been collected for this instrument, so there is none. Every number is measured against your own average, never against other people. An octant score of 4.0 means you agreed with those four statements, not that you are in any percentile.
• Nothing about ability, or about hiring. No published study shows DISC or the interpersonal circumplex predicting job performance well enough to select people. The items are also transparent, so anyone can shape their result.
• The Croatian version is a translation, not a validated instrument. The figures above were measured on the English wording. A translated scale has to be re-validated before its psychometrics carry over, and that has not been done here.
• No reverse-keyed items. All 32 statements point positively at their octant, which is how the instrument is published. Elevation captures the resulting response bias, and subtracting it protects your position on the circle, but the raw octant scores are still inflated or deflated by it.
• The DISC profile text is ours. The items and the geometry come from published work. The twelve style descriptions do not; they are written to match the octants each sector sits between.

Sources

1. Markey, P. M., & Markey, C. N. (2009). A brief assessment of the interpersonal circumplex: The IPIP-IPC. Assessment, 16(4), 352–361. doi:10.1177/1073191109340382
2. Goldberg, L. R. et al. International Personality Item Pool, and the IPIP-IPC scoring key. ipip.ori.org
3. Zhang, W. et al. (2024). Psychometric and circumplex properties of the IPIP-IPC in Chinese people living with HIV. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 17, 673–686. PMC10896111
4. Gurtman, M. B. (1992). Construct validity of interpersonal personality measures: The interpersonal circumplex as a nomological net. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 105–118.
5. Wright, A. G. C., Pincus, A. L., Conroy, D. E., & Hilsenroth, M. J. (2009). Integrating methods to optimize circumplex description and comparison of groups. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91, 311–322.
6. Wiggins, J. S. (1979). A psychological taxonomy of trait-descriptive terms: The interpersonal domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 395–412.
7. Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of Normal People. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
8. John Wiley & Sons (2013). Everything DiSC Research Report for Adaptive Testing Assessment. PDF
9. Dekker, B., & van Thiel, E. (2021). Concurrent validation study DISC vs. Big Five. 123test. PDF
10. Martinussen, M., Richardsen, A. M., & Vårum, H. W. (2001). Validation of an ipsative personality measure (DISCUS). Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 42(5), 411–416. doi:10.1111/1467-9450.00253
11. König, C. J., & Marcus, B. (2013). TBS-TK Rezension: persolog Persönlichkeitsprofil. Psychologische Rundschau, 64(3). doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000171