Ipsative

Ipsative describes a form of assessment in which an individual's responses are interpreted relative to that individual's own performance, rather than to a normative group. In ipsative assessment, tasks are designed so that choices reveal preference, strength, or change within the person, often by forcing a choice among equally desirable attributes or by ranking options. Ipsatization is a statistical step used to center scores around the respondent's own mean, producing ipsative scores.

Ipsative methods are used in psychology and education, particularly in personality testing and progress feedback. In personality testing, forced-choice items reduce social desirability bias and help identify relative strengths; in education, ipsative feedback can show degree of personal growth by comparing current results to prior performance. Because scoring centers on the individual, absolute levels are less informative than patterns of relative strength or change.

Advantages include highlighting within-person differences, reducing certain response biases, and providing actionable feedback on growth. Limitations include limited ability to compare across individuals, and problematic statistical properties for group-level inference since scores are interdependent and often exhibit negative correlations among scales. Reliability and validity assessments can be complicated, and cross-interpretation with normative benchmarks is limited.

Because of these properties, ipsative data are typically analyzed with methods that account for dependency, and interpretation emphasizes relative change and personal development rather than universal yardsticks. The term ipsativity derives from the Latin root for self, reflecting its self-referential orientation in assessment and scoring.