Do you make updates to questions (items) in The Birkman Method?

Yes, Birkman is always testing to find possible improvements for the questionnaire, and we occasionally make updates to the questions for that purpose.

Testing of Current Fields

Currently, there are eight fields in the questionnaire to test questions (items) for their quality, allowing us to identify and remove bad items.

Example of bad items:

• “I cheat often.”
• 99% of people answer “FALSE.”
• “I like hearing new ideas.”
• 99% of people answer “TRUE.”

When an item yields this consistency across respondents, the item does not provide meaningful information and should not be used.

To test our current items, eight are randomly administered from a pool of over 500 items, for the “most” section and corresponding text for the “self” section.

Our Process for Updating the Questionnaire

These are our steps for replacing items in the assessment:

• Identify bad items
• Write new items to test constructs to be measured
• Administer new field testing items
• Gather data and analyze
• Replace bad items
• Run reliability and validity studies on updated scales
• Repeat process for all bad items and scales

The constant testing of questionnaire items is time-consuming, but it is necessary to continually maintain and improve upon the quality of the assessment.