Chapter 1
What the result means
Read the profile first. Tradition names provide concise references for nearby patterns across the seven dimensions.
What it can tell you
The IR Worldview Inventory is best read as an editorially designed interpretation tool. It asks which arguments you tend to find more convincing, where your instincts cluster, and where they pull in different directions.
The result summarizes your answers. It has not been validated as a scientific diagnostic or a measure of expertise, and it does not identify a permanent personality type.
In short
- This editorial questionnaire has not been validated as a scientific instrument.
- Tradition labels are shorthand for a multidimensional profile.
- Mixed outputs show where your answers draw on more than one modeled tradition.
- No score is a population percentile or population ranking.
How to read the four result layers
Core profile
The foundation result is a seven-dimension profile. This is the main output. It shows which lines of argument you lean toward and where you are mixed.
Closest traditions
One or two IR traditions are shown as interpretive shorthand for that profile. They are labels for a pattern, not natural kinds or permanent identities.
Strategic and normative style
The result also reports a strategic style and a normative style. These modifiers sit alongside the profile. They are not separate worldview families.
Focus Areas
Security and Technology Focus Areas produce separate records from concrete issue files. Their domain scales are not translated onto the Foundation or combined into a master score.
Who it is for
The main audience is people who think seriously about foreign policy, international order, or strategic affairs: students, practitioners, researchers, and engaged readers. Some IR background helps, but the main prompts are written in plain English rather than specialist jargon.
It can also work as a classroom or discussion tool. The value is often in seeing where you expected one tradition label but the profile itself points somewhere more mixed.
Why Focus Area records stay separate
Broad priors and domain-specific instincts are related, but they are not the same thing. Someone can hold a generally institutionalist foundation profile and still lean toward deterrence-heavy arguments in a Security Focus Area. Someone else can read world politics through power and rivalry in the abstract but still resist escalation in a concrete case.
That is why the inventory keeps the Foundation result separate from Focus Area records. Focus Areas show how a profile travels into live arguments. They do not add points to the core classification.
Focus Area questions do three different jobs. Explanation cards ask what best explains a case. Decision cards ask what should carry the most weight in response. Actor-lens cards ask what logic would look strongest from that actor's own position, and are tracked separately so perspective-modeling does not overwrite your own judgment.
In shared Foundation links, the Foundation profile, closest traditions, and style outputs travel with the result. Focus Area interpretation is treated as a separate applied readout.
Why these issue areas
The focus-area structure is loosely inspired by how international affairs programs, including the SAIS MAIR curriculum, often group issue areas. This project is independent and does not imply affiliation or endorsement.
Foundation forms and the research-comparison block
New Foundation runs start with the core. The optional baseline extension keeps the scored questions in their existing order and omits the separate research-comparison battery. That battery includes U.S.-specific statements drawn from a published foreign-policy scale; it does not contribute to the worldview result.
Saved full-extension drafts keep their original questions and totals. You can continue that form or explicitly restart. Results retain their exact form, so the old and new administrations remain distinguishable. Identical scored answers produce identical scores; that does not show that people would answer identically after a change in context or burden.
Chapter 2
How answers become a profile
The Foundation combines seven dimensions. Scoring and labels translate those values into a readable profile without turning the output into a permanent type.
How scoring works
Scoring begins with the foundation questions. Some items are plain-language agreement prompts, while others are tradeoffs or mini-cases. Together they map onto the same seven dimensions and are averaged into a seven-dimension profile on a 1 to 7 scale.
The model then compares that profile with four stylized tradition profiles: realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and critical political economy. The closest one or two are shown as interpretive shorthand.
Strategic and normative style are reported separately from the restraint and order-versus-justice dimensions. They help describe the profile, but they do not create a new worldview family.
Focus Area scores are issue-specific. Actor-lens responses are stored and shown, but they do not quietly become your main Focus Area read the way a normal own-judgment answer would.
High political-economy salience does not automatically force a Critical Political Economy result. A stronger critical or systemic pattern is required before that tradition becomes the primary shorthand.
The seven dimensions
The foundation profile is built from seven dimensions drawn from major debates in IR. They are meant to capture broad explanatory priors and style differences without pretending to measure everything that matters.
- Security rivalry
- How much weight do you give to rivalry, uncertainty about intentions, and positional competition among major powers? High scores lean toward the view that security competition is a durable constraint. Low scores suggest skepticism that rivalry is the main organizing logic.
- Institutions and rules
- Do you think rules, monitoring, and repeated interaction can make cooperation more durable even without a world government? High scores lean institutionalist. Low scores suggest you see institutions mostly as mirrors of power.
- Domestic politics
- How much do coalitions, regime type, bureaucratic capacity, and transnational actors shape foreign policy relative to external pressure? This dimension captures whether you think states facing similar environments can still behave differently for domestic reasons.
- Identity and legitimacy
- Do legitimacy, recognition, and social meaning help shape interests and threats, or are they mostly rhetorical cover for material interests? High scores lean constructivist. Low scores suggest skepticism that norms have much independent force.
- Markets and dependence
- How central are production, finance, trade dependence, sanctions, and leverage to your explanation of world politics? High scores mean you keep political economy firmly in view. They do not, by themselves, make you a critical political economist.
- Restraint and advantage
- When a major power has room to press for advantage, is the safer instinct to hold back or to exploit the opening? This is a strategic style dimension, not a standalone worldview family.
- Order and justice
- When sovereignty and wider moral obligations clash, which usually carries more weight in your judgment? This is a normative style dimension, not a claim about who is more moral.
Which choices are authored
Three aspects of the scoring model involve explicit editorial choices that are not derived from calibration data. Naming them plainly is part of honest instrument design.
- Second-choice answers count at reduced weight
- In Advanced mode, tradeoff and mini-case questions let you pick a second-choice answer after your primary. That secondary answer is scored at 45% of the weight of your primary pick. This reflects the intuition that a genuine second choice is a softer signal than a clear primary commitment, but it is not derived from a validated weighting experiment. It is an authored judgment.
- Family weights are authored reference profiles
- The four authored tradition reference points used to identify the closest tradition-level fit are realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and critical political economy. They are stylized summaries built from editorial judgment about what each tradition centrally holds. They are not derived from a sample of scholars or validated against an external standard. The closest modeled fit is an interpretive shorthand, not a certified diagnosis.
- Focus Area results are separate records, not Foundation measurements
- Focus Area results come from issue-specific questions and are reported on their own domain scales. They sit beside the Foundation and do not rescore its seven dimensions or archetype. There is no numeric bridge and no master score combining the records.
How Perspective Runs work
Each Perspective Run answer adds a predefined change to one or more Foundation dimensions. The result compares those adjusted scores with your saved baseline.
The saved Foundation remains your baseline. Perspective Runs do not assign another worldview family or feed points back into Foundation scoring.
Small differences should be read lightly. The result names the scenario responsible for the largest change and the dimensions that stayed close to the baseline.
Why the wording is plain English
The prompts aim to be readable without prior theory training. Technical language lives in optional explainers, not in the main question stem.
Jargon-heavy prompts can reward prior training instead of revealing the judgment the question is meant to test. Plain language reduces that problem and makes disagreement easier to interpret.
Chapter 3
Evidence and versioning
Maps and public-position records are editorial reference layers. Their construction, support, and limits remain visible rather than borrowing certainty from the scoring system.
Foundation robustness diagnostic
The Foundation robustness diagnostic uses constructed answer sets, not human participants. It reruns the live scorer and result resolver after the smallest permitted answer changes, forced-choice substitutions, and defined omission and neutralisation probes. This is a deterministic structural-sensitivity diagnostic.
Results changed more often near family boundaries and the boundary between a single-family and blended reading. The correlated synthetic and canonical ensembles changed less often when their starting results were farther from those boundaries.
The diagnostic supports no claim about reliability, validity, or population distributions. The exact methods, seeds, protected-file digests, and generated data are available in the project repository.
The posture sign uses 4 as a registered raw-score boundary. Four is not the constructed null center for every form. For the exact full form, the registered independent-null calibration centers restraint at 4.657735. The authored forced-choice signals make that form asymmetric around the raw boundary, so equal numeric distances on either side of 4 should not be read as equivalent positions around the form's constructed center.
How the Worldview Map is built
The reference matrix is the default view. Its columns are Power, Rules, Meaning, and Structure; its rows are applying advantage and restraint. The eight cells hold the eight pure Foundation archetypes. An exact saved Foundation payload marks one cell for a pure result or two cells in the same row for a blend.
The secondary continuous view has a horizontal axis from power and competition to rules and institutions, and a vertical axis from material and economic structure to ideas and norms. Each Foundation value is centered on the neutral score of 4, multiplied by an authored weight, and added to its axis. The two sums are divided by fixed spread constants and limited to the range from −1 to 1. This normalization is an editorial construction, not an estimate from a population.
Eligible personal baselines and Perspective Runs use those coefficients. Decision Patterns and evidence-coded reference positions use the same projection as contextual overlays. Restraint is not part of either axis, so this view cannot distinguish the two matrix postures. Realism, Institutionalism, and Critical political economy all include material explanations, so the vertical axis separates those references only weakly.
The continuous view supports orientation and side-by-side reading. Screen distance is not calibrated; it measures neither ideological difference nor uncertainty.
Decision Patterns use authored fingerprints. Low, medium, and high levels become 2.5, 4, and 5.5 on the internal Foundation scale. Dimensions absent from a pattern fingerprint use the midpoint of 4 for projection. Decision Pattern marks are authored editorial examples; no population sample underlies them.
How thinkers and public positions are coded
Thinkers and public positions summarize public postures from a dated source ledger. Each record carries an evidence window, dimension-level support, dispute notes, dated updates, and a second-person review before publication.
A public reading card needs support on at least five Foundation dimensions. A map position requires linked evidence on all seven dimensions because the projection consumes all seven values. Missing values remain missing, and the profile stays off the map.
The internal coding stores values on the Foundation's 1–7 scale. The public default view shows support levels, coding notes, sources, and disputes while keeping the coefficients hidden. Strong support requires linked evidence from at least two source records.
AI-governance profiles use the separate AI Governance axes and their own visualization. Values from the two instruments are never merged into a single coordinate.
Saved history and shared links
Your browser can retain current and earlier Foundation, Focus Area, AI, and Perspective Run results. You can remove that history from the Privacy page.
Shared Profile links can include AI Governance and Perspective Runs with their dates. Older shared links may contain fewer result types.
Glossary
Short definitions for the terms that recur across questions, results, and profiles.
- Realism
- A tradition that treats states as the primary actors in world politics, emphasizes the role of power and uncertainty, and is skeptical that institutions or norms can fully restrain competition.
- Institutionalism
- An approach arguing that international institutions, including treaties, organizations, and rules, can make cooperation more durable even in the absence of a central authority to enforce them.
- Constructivism
- A perspective emphasizing how the meaning of threats, alliances, and interests is shaped by identity, recognition, and shared social expectations beyond the material facts.
- Political economy
- An approach explaining world politics through structures of production, finance, trade dependence, and economic power where a security-first account would look to military rivalry alone.
- Pluralism
- In normative IR theory, the view that international order rests on sovereign equality and non-intervention. States should not be forced to conform to a single standard of governance.
- Solidarism
- The view that there are universal moral obligations that can, in extreme cases, override state sovereignty, for instance to stop mass atrocities.
- Restraint
- A grand-strategy disposition that favors limiting military commitments, avoiding overextension, and resisting the temptation to seek permanent primacy.
Sources and references
The theoretical content draws on major IR traditions and on classic work in survey design, political judgment, and belief systems. These references matter less as authorities to obey than as reminders of what this tool can and cannot honestly claim.
- Likert, Rensis. "A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes." Archives of Psychology, no. 140 (1932).
The core template behind agreement scales. Useful as a reminder that scaling answers is not the same thing as validating an instrument.
- Converse, Philip E. "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." In D. E. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent. Free Press, 1964.
A classic statement of the problem any worldview inventory faces: many people do not hold fully coherent, systematized belief structures across issues.
- Zaller, John R. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
A reminder that survey responses often reflect which considerations are most available at the moment, not permanently fixed inner doctrines.
- Tetlock, Philip E. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press, 2005.
Relevant here because eclectic thinkers often outperform those who force every question through one master lens.
- Sil, Rudra and Katzenstein, Peter J. Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
The best justification for taking mixed results seriously rather than treating the runner-up as noise.
Chapter 4
Limits, privacy, and corrections
The inventory states where interpretation stops, explains what generated links contain, and gives factual, privacy, and security problems a narrow correction route.
Important limitations
- Not validated
- This is not a validated psychometric instrument. The dimensions, family profiles, and thresholds reflect theoretical judgment and editorial design, not large-sample calibration.
- Traditions are shorthand
- Realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and critical political economy are modeled here as simplified reference profiles. The inventory preserves issue-specific combinations instead of forcing every answer into one tradition.
- Political economy is not a catch-all
- The model distinguishes broad political-economy salience from a stronger critical or systemic commitment. Thinking economics matters does not automatically make someone a Critical Political Economy result.
- Focus Areas are separate
- Focus Areas are meant to surface domain-specific instinct, not to masquerade as extra scientific precision. Their readouts are kept separate from the Foundation result.
- Scores are relative, not absolute
- A score of 5.4 on a dimension means you lean that way within this model's scale. It does not mean 54% of people agree with you, and it is not a percentile.
- Coverage is incomplete
- The current model does not fully represent several important traditions, including feminist IR, postcolonial theory, and green IR. People anchored in those traditions may be mapped onto the nearest modeled family instead.
Privacy and research data
Draft answers and saved histories stay in this browser. Generating a result creates a URL with the data needed to reopen it; Focus Area result URLs include selected answer IDs. Separate first-party counters may receive derived buckets when coarse measurement is enabled. The site does not collect research responses or connect contact details to results.
Any future study would require separate information about its purpose, data, consent, retention, deletion, security, and access rules. Product analytics remain coarse and do not accept answers, profiles, result links, or free text.
Corrections and contact
Use the project contact route for a factual correction, privacy question, or security report. Do not include quiz answers, a result or Profile link, or another person's information.