Editorial Standards
What every guide on this site is held to before it's published, and what we do when an instrument's evidence doesn't support a strong claim.
Why this page exists
Personality content online runs on a spectrum from “peer-reviewed instrument, honestly described” to “quiz built for shares, dressed up in psychology language.” Readers can't always tell which side of that line a given article sits on, and that's a real problem when the article is about your attachment patterns or your conflict style. This page states the rules Your True Self holds itself to, so you don't have to take the accuracy of any guide on faith.
The four rules
1. Every psychological claim traces to a citation you could look up yourself.
Not “studies show” or “research indicates” — an author, a year, and a source. Each guide ends with a numbered reference list. If a guide makes a claim about what percentage of adults are securely attached, or how conflict styles map onto relationship satisfaction, that number has a citation attached to it in the guide itself, not just on this page in the abstract.
2. Validation strength is stated plainly, every time.
The eight instruments this site uses do not carry equal scientific weight, and the guides say so directly:
| Instrument | Evidence base |
|---|---|
| Big Five (IPIP-NEO) | Extensive peer-reviewed validity and reliability evidence; the most replicated personality model in the field (Goldberg, 1999). |
| Attachment (ECR-RS) | Peer-reviewed, widely used in attachment research (Fraley et al., 2011). |
| Values (PVQ-40) | Cross-culturally validated across 70+ countries (Schwartz, 2012). |
| Conflict style (DUTCH) | Peer-reviewed instrument built specifically to improve on the older Thomas-Kilmann format (De Dreu et al., 2001). |
| Communication style | Widely used in organizational contexts (Merrill & Reid, 1981); less independently validated than the four above. |
| Holland Codes (RIASEC) | Long-standing, widely used vocational framework (Holland, 1997). |
| Love Languages | Large practitioner following; more limited peer-reviewed psychometric validation than the instruments above. |
| Enneagram | Large practitioner following; more limited peer-reviewed clinical validation than the instruments above. |
A guide about the Enneagram is written differently from a guide about the Big Five, because the evidence is different. We don't borrow the credibility of the strongest instrument on the site and spread it across all eight.
3. No claim outruns what the underlying data supports.
If an assessment result is based on fewer responses than the instrument's scoring model requires, the report says so and withholds the score rather than estimating one. The DUTCH conflict-style scoring, for example, requires a minimum of 10 responses before it reports a primary and secondary mode; below that threshold, the report flags the result as insufficient data rather than guessing. The same discipline applies to the writing: a guide won't claim an instrument predicts an outcome that hasn't actually been studied.
4. Report content is generated from your data, and checked against it before you see it.
Every section of your personalized report is required to tie back to specific scores from your actual assessment responses. Content that fails that check gets regenerated. It never ships as generic filler dressed up to look personal. The methodology page covers the technical mechanism (evidence anchors, schema validation, retry logic); this page covers the editorial commitment behind it.
What we correct, and how
When a factual error, an outdated citation, or an internal inconsistency turns up in published content, it gets fixed. It doesn't get left to accumulate, and it doesn't get fixed quietly without a trace: the guide's “last updated” date moves when the fix does. Two examples of the kind of thing this covers:
- A guide's FAQ section can end up carrying two conflicting statistics for the same question, such as the percentage of adults who are securely attached. That's a duplication error, an editing slip, not a real disagreement in the literature. When caught, the guide is corrected to the single sourced figure and the duplicate entry is removed.
- Guides are dated with when they were last substantively updated. A date only changes when the content itself changes: a new citation, an expanded section, a correction. It never moves as a freshness gesture with no underlying edit.
What this site is not
- Not a clinical evaluation, a diagnosis, or a substitute for a licensed professional.
- Not written or reviewed by a psychologist, therapist, or clinician under this byline — see the author page for exactly what “written by” means here.
- Not going to claim an instrument is more validated than it is, even when the stronger claim would read better.
Questions or corrections
Found something inaccurate, outdated, or unclear? Email team@yourtrueself.app. Corrections to published guides are made directly in the article and noted in that guide's “last updated” date.