A friend sent a link to an online personality assessment recently. Although I rarely take them, I did take this one, more because it was my friend asking than because I really wanted to do it.

I'm not going to supply the name of the particular one I took. I will tell you it only captured part of what I think my personality is.

I tend to avoid these assessments, because they are constructed with too many absolutes to suit me. I need one that has as answer choices "maybe" and "it depends."

As I told my friend, if those choices were available, I suspect my answers would put me in the category, "complicated bitch."

Over the years, I've run across a lot of personality assessments. The first one I knew of was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's much more comprehensive than the ones you'll usually find online! MMPI is used in many cases as a diagnostic tool for mental illness. And it's a series of true-false statements.

When I was in college we studied that assessment (it's not correct to call them "tests," by the way, though I find myself doing it half the time...). As it happened, one of the people most involved in development of MMPI was the Psychology Department head at Carolina.