A while ago I read through a lot of Gallup's Strengths and Wellbeing books. They looked good to me, but I don't know enough statistics to understand their technical reports, so I couldn't even begin to assess how accurate they were. Also, I've never studied positive psychology on anything more than a popular book level, so I can't bring sophisticated domain knowledge to bear either. Could someone look over the following and comment?
StrengthsFinder 2.0 (StrengthsFinder test is available for $10 here. They also have an entrepreneurial-focused version at the same location.)
Wellbeing
There might be more, but those are the studies I was able to find.
Also, I'm curious if anybody else here has taken the StrengthsFinder assessment. What were your thoughts? Did it help you in any way? Care to share your strengths with the LW community?
I took the assessment twice (they don't really allow that - the second time I submitted a different email address), about a year apart. The first time the top 5 results were Futuristic, Learner, Ideation, Intellection, Input. The second time it was Intellection, Strategic, Futuristic, Learner, Input. I'm not sure what that says that it gave me two different results. On the one hand 4 out of 5 were the same. On the other hand they were all in a different order. But slightly different results seems to be what's expected, from what I could pick up from the research reports.
I took StrengthsFinder 2.0 soon after a new manager was hired for my office. I was skeptical of it, but not negative. The Strengths it gave me were unsurprising. The most use I got out of the exercise was from insights gleaned from a roundtable discussion about these strengths from the outside view of coworkers who had known me for a few months to more than a year.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.