Values tests and life purpose tests: what they measure

What is a value?

A value is something you treat as important across situations: a guiding principle you use to choose between options, to justify what you did, and to judge what other people do. That is broader than a preference and narrower than a personality trait. Liking jazz is a preference. Holding that people should be free to work things out for themselves is a value.

Shalom Schwartz gave the idea a shape that could be tested, by sorting values according to the motivation behind them and asking whether the same set turns up wherever you look. Survey samples from 20 countries recovered ten basic values: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism (Schwartz, 1992). Almost every value word people use in ordinary conversation, from adventure to loyalty to fairness, falls somewhere in that space.

The more useful part of the finding is the arrangement. The ten sit in a circle, so that neighbours are compatible and values on opposite sides pull against each other. Benevolence and universalism sit together and face achievement and power. Security, conformity and tradition face self-direction and stimulation. This is why a values exercise so often feels like a set of trade-offs rather than a shopping list: moving toward one value usually costs you something on the far side of the circle.

Two things follow. A values profile is a ranking of your own priorities rather than a score you can be high or low on, and the conflicts it shows you are structural, not a sign that you are inconsistent. Wanting both a settled life and a surprising one is an ordinary human position, not a contradiction to be resolved.

What do meaning in life questionnaires measure?

Meaning in life is a separate construct from values, and it is measured separately. The best known instrument splits it in two: the presence of meaning, which is how far you already experience your life as significant and comprehensible, and the search for meaning, which is how actively you are looking for it (Steger et al., 2006). The two scales are not opposites. Some people score high on both, and searching is not by itself a sign that something is wrong.

Purpose sits in a wider frame again. Carol Ryff argued that defining well-being as pleasant feeling left most of what makes a life go well unmeasured, and proposed six dimensions instead: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth (Ryff, 1989). Purpose in life is one of the six. That is why a purpose questionnaire usually reads like a well-being questionnaire with the pleasant feelings taken out: it asks whether your days point somewhere, not whether they feel good.

Life satisfaction is a third thing. The Satisfaction With Life Scale asks five questions about how you judge your life as a whole against your own standards (Diener et al., 1985). Someone can rate their life as going well and still say it does not add up to much, and the reverse happens often enough that the two are worth keeping apart on a report.

How are values different from personality traits?

A trait is a description of how you typically behave, feel and think. The Big Five structure was assembled over decades of lexical research into which trait words travel together in ordinary language (Goldberg, 1993), and it is deliberately value-neutral: there is no good end of Openness to Experience. A value is not a description of behaviour at all. It is a statement about what you are aiming at, and it is the one thing on a personality report that people will defend rather than merely recognise.

Character strengths sit between the two. The classification of 24 strengths under six virtues was built by looking for qualities that philosophical and religious traditions agree are worth having, so every strength is both a disposition and something valued (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Several of them, gratitude, hope and spirituality among them, cover ground that a meaning questionnaire also covers.

Traits and values interact in a way that matters for reading either one. A value supplies the direction; traits supply the follow-through and the tolerance for the friction that acting on a value creates. Two people can rank benevolence first and live very differently, because one of them finds it easy to say no to everything else. This is why a values list on its own rarely changes anything. The question that moves people is not what do I value but where do my week and my list disagree.

There is also an evidence link worth knowing. Among the 24 character strengths, a small subset is consistently and robustly associated with life satisfaction: hope, zest, gratitude, love and curiosity, while the intellectual strengths and modesty relate only weakly (Park et al., 2004). That is cross-sectional data, so it does not show that becoming more grateful makes you more satisfied. It does suggest where to look first.

What can a values test tell you, and what can it not?

Most values exercises take one of two forms. A card sort gives you a deck of value words and makes you cut it down, to ten and then five and then three, forcing trade-offs that a rating scale lets you dodge. A questionnaire instead scores several statements per value. The card sort produces something you remember; the questionnaire produces something you can compare over time.

• What both do well. They give unformed priorities a name, they surface conflicts you have been managing without noticing, and they give you language for a decision you already half made.
• They cannot tell you whether you are living by them. A ranking captures what you endorse. Whether your calendar agrees is a different measurement, and it needs questions about what you actually did rather than what you believe in.
• They are the easiest kind of self-report to answer well. Values items describe ideals, and almost nobody ranks power first. Read your own profile with that in mind, and weight the items that cost you something to admit.
• Forced-ranking scores do not compare cleanly between people. When an exercise makes you rank ten values against each other, the result describes your internal ordering. It cannot say that your benevolence is higher than someone else's.
• They are not a verdict on your life. A low presence-of-meaning score describes a period, not a person, and the standard instrument scores the search for meaning as its own dimension rather than as the absence of meaning (Steger et al., 2006).

Values also shift, though slowly, and usually around the events that reorganise a life: a birth, a loss, a move, a change of work. Treating a values reading as a fixed result is the most common mistake people make with one. Treating it as a dated snapshot you can take again is the use that pays.

What does a good values or purpose assessment look like?

• It separates what you value from how far you are living it, and reports the two apart rather than blending them into one number.
• It names the specific things it measures, so that a low score points somewhere: to purpose, or to values clarity, or to a sense that your actions and your beliefs have drifted.
• It asks several statements per idea. Reliability rises with the number of items, and very short scales understate how much a trait matters (Credé et al., 2012).
• It treats searching as information rather than as a problem, following the presence and search distinction (Steger et al., 2006).
• It keeps meaning, life satisfaction and pleasant feeling separate, because they come apart in the data (Ryff, 1989; Diener et al., 1985).
• It says how its comparison sample was gathered, and what the bands mean.
• It ends with something you can do this week, not a certificate with your top three values on it.

How does the Wellington Membership measure values and purpose?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot does not measure this domain. It is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, and it covers the six broad dimensions of personality structure: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. That is the right place to start, and for many people it is enough, but the dimensions describe how you behave rather than what you are for. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked; after question ten you sign in with an email so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait: 336 questions in 4 chapters, reaching 90 traits. It covers every Big Five facet and all 24 character strengths, which includes the meaning-adjacent ones such as Gratitude, Hope and Spirituality. None of the meaning, values and purpose traits themselves are reported at that stage. They arrive as the membership adds one short weekly module at a time over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits across eight domains. 12 of those weeks are given to this one.

Each trait is scored the same way as every other one: the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands, Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. In the written report, every trait has three pages, one per band, so Values Clarity comes back as The Open Field, The Working Compass or The True North rather than as a number, and Purpose comes back as The Unhurried Path, The Working Direction or The Set Compass. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time. The methodology shows how the writing works, and the membership page explains how the weekly modules run.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between a values test and a personality test?

A personality test describes how you typically behave, in terms that are meant to be neutral. A values test asks what you are aiming at, and every item on it describes something desirable. The two answer different questions, and they interact: values set the direction, traits shape how easily you hold to it when acting on a value costs you something.

How many core values are there?

Research on the structure of values recovered ten basic types across samples from 20 countries: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism (Schwartz, 1992). Popular card sorts use much longer word lists, but almost every word on them maps into those ten, and the ten sit in a circle where opposite values trade off against each other.

Is a low score on a meaning in life questionnaire something to worry about?

Not by itself. The standard instrument scores the presence of meaning and the search for meaning as two separate dimensions rather than as two ends of one scale (Steger et al., 2006). A low presence score describes a period in your life, often one after a change, rather than a fixed fact about you. It is worth re-taking after a few months to see whether it moved.

Does Wellington measure values?

Yes, in the Wellington Membership rather than in the free Snapshot. The membership measures 25 traits in this domain across four subdomains, including Values Clarity, Values-Aligned Action, Authentic Living, Purpose and Sense of Life Meaning, each on a percentile with a written page for your band.