I’m featuring two self-assessments here that focus on clarifying what your strengths are: the Clifton StrengthsFinder®, and the VIA Survey.

The Clifton StrengthsFinder® was developed by the Gallup Organization. Based on a lot of interview data, they came up with 34 distinct patterns of strengths, or what they call “talent themes”. The online self-assessment tells individuals which of those “themes” are most pronounced in them. From the perspective of management consulting, the assumption here is that by identifying people’s strengths, an organization’s overall performance can be improved.

The VIA Survey was created by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, well-known researchers in the field of positive psychology. It is designed to identify a person’s profile of character strengths. The inventory informed the Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook (CSV), a counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) used in traditional psychology. Unlike the DSM, which categorizes human deficits and disorders, the CSV classifies positive human strengths.

So, the two assessments have different origins and purposes, but both are centered on helping people recognize and build upon their strengths.

I took both self-assessments online and read up on the research behind them, and here are my observations on both of them.

The research:

• There is a technical report on the StrengthsFinder® website that summarizes the development and validation process of the assessment. Several studies with huge sample sizes by research groups both inside and outside of Gallup have tested the reliability and validity of the assessment, and the technical report provides a lot of information about the statistical characteristics of the measures and their usefulness for interventions.

• The VIA team also provides a nice (shorter) overview of the survey’s psychometrics on their website. Aside from the standard measures that we would expect, such as alpha coefficients, they also present a factor analysis, which reveals a discrepancy between their model and the newer research. This gives me a better impression than if everything looked smooth, which honest research rarely is. While the number of studies that tested the VIA Survey is rather small, they have been conducted by more than one research group (suggesting at least one might be independent from the developers), and have been published in peer-reviewed journals (rather than books or self-published “reports”). The journal that published the factor analysis, “Assessment”, is a high-impact journal.

In addition to the validation of the survey itself, you’ll find an extensive literature overview on the VIA website, summarizing what the research says about character strengths in general.

The money, and what you get for it:

• For the StrengthsFinder®, you have buy the book first, before you can take the assessment (you’ll need the access code you get in the book). As a result of taking the assessment, you get a report with your top 5 strengths, along with some suggestions for action plans. You would have to pay more for any more detailed reports, including the full rank order of your strengths.

• The VIA® Institute of Character is a non-profit organization. You can take the assessment for free, without buying a book. As a result of that self-assessment, you’ll get your entire “Strength Profile”, as a rank order, along with a short description of 24 possible strengths. There too, you could pay for more elaborate results.

My subjective experience taking the assessments:

• I found some of the questions in the StrengthsFinder® very irritating. Here’s one example of a question I wouldn’t possibly know how to answer:So if I’m somebody who never makes deadlines and don’t deliver what I promised, I get the same score (“Neutral”) as somebody who always makes deadlines and follows through on her commitments? That just doesn’t sound like a good idea.

• The StrengthsFinder® enforces a time limit to answer each question, which is unusual for personality questionnaires. I don’t know of any research suggesting it would be an advantage to “not think too long” before answering. I suspect the real reason they’re doing this is to prevent people from copying the questions. (I did for example miss the question above, because I spent all my allotted time first scratching my head in disbelief and then taking a screenshot.)

• The VIA Survey took less time to take, and the questions seemed (very subjectively!) to make more sense.

Overall, they both seem like well-researched instruments: the StrengthsFinder® more commercialized and more widely used, but also with more research history. I personally found that the VIA Survey gave me more bang for my buck (which was no buck at all in this case), and was less annoying to take.

How about you?

I’d love to hear other’s perspectives, and I know many of my readers are very familiar with the StrengthsFinder at least, if not with both instruments.

Did you ever take either of these assessments? Or are using them in your own practice with clients or employees? What has been your experience? (If you’d like me to respond, please don’t forget to include your email address — but I’ll be very interested in reading your comments either way.)

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

Earlier posts on self-assessments:

• • Interest Profiler for Career Choices
  • Personality: Free Short Versions of the Big Five Test
  • The Myth of Personality Types
  • A Career Development Tool For Academics