Methodology
How this inventory works
This editorial questionnaire compares your answers across seven foreign-policy tradeoffs. It shows which arguments recur and where your judgments pull in different directions.
What the result 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 are normal and can be meaningful.
- No score is a percentile, and no answer is morally superior.
Privacy and research data
Results and histories stay in this browser unless you explicitly share them. 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.
How to read a result
Read the profile first. Tradition names provide concise references for nearby patterns across the seven dimensions.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Focus Areas
Security and Technology Focus Areas test the baseline in concrete issue files. Their top-line read stays separate from the Foundation result rather than pretending to be a more scientific replacement for it.
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.
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.
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.
How the Worldview Map is built
The Worldview Map projection converts seven Foundation values into two screen axes with authored coefficients. Every personal baseline, Perspective Run, and eligible thinker or public position passes through the same projection.
The map supports orientation and side-by-side reading. It has no validated metric for distance, population density, uncertainty, or statistical similarity. Screen space between two marks carries no measured amount of ideological difference.
Worldview profiles use authored fingerprints. Low, medium, and high levels become 2.5, 4, and 5.5 on the internal Foundation scale. Dimensions absent from a profile fingerprint use the midpoint of 4 for projection. Profile 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.
Why the module layer is 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 module. 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 the focus-area modules. The modules are there to show how a profile travels into live arguments, not to smuggle extra points back into the core classification.
The module cards now 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 the current shared-result flow, the foundation profile, closest traditions, and style outputs are what travel with the main result link. Module 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.
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.
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.
Module scores are issue-specific. Actor-lens responses are stored and shown, but they do not quietly become your main module 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.
On precision:The inventory does not report a confidence or “clarity” figure because the model has no validated measure for either claim.
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 Analyst 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 tradition profiles used for classification — realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and critical political economy — are stylized reference points 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.
Module overlays are editorial transforms, not fresh Foundation measurements
Module results come from module-specific questions and are reported as a domain-specific read of your instincts in that issue area. They do not re-measure the seven Foundation dimensions from scratch. The module overlay is an editorial relative pull — it shifts emphasis within the space the Foundation result already defines rather than replacing it with a more precise measurement. Treating it as additional scientific precision would overstate what the model does.
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. Most serious readers draw from more than one tradition depending on the issue.
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.
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.