“Professional Writers, Personality Types, & Genre Choice”
by Kim Darnell | Xchanges 8.1
Methodology
This study had two major components. Phase I entailed the informal, preliminary interviews with professional writers while Phase II entailed the web-based survey. Approval for both phases was granted by the University Social Behavioral Institutional Review Board: IRB00000216.
Phase I
Participants: Participants for Phase I were 3 professional, adult writers recruited from the English faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno — one poet, one fiction writer, and one nonfiction writer. For this study, a professional writer was defined as someone who has published at least one piece of writing in any given genre.
Procedure: Individual interviews with participants were scheduled via email. Interviews took approximately 20 minutes and were conducted in faculty offices. The major question was designed informally as a means of generating conversation about perceptions of differences between different types of writers. At the time of interview, the following questions were asked:
- Are there certain personality traits that you feel are generally linked with specific genre/s (i.e. Poets are typically X)?
- Are there other writers who you would like to refer me to for participation in my survey? Do you belong to any writer’s associations or clubs that you would like to extend my survey to?
Participants’ responses were recorded via note-taking by the interviewer (no personally identifying information was noted). Since these interviews were meant to be very informal and the sample size was extremely small, no recording or transcription was done. The main purpose of the interviews was simply to informally assess writers’ perceptions of personality differences among writers of different genres and to see if those perceptions could guide the interpretation of the survey results.
Phase II
Participants: Participants for Phase II were 67 professional, adult writers. These participants were recruited from University of Nevada, Reno faculty (via their public email addresses) as well as by the email addresses provided from Phase I interviewees. All of the writers emailed were also encouraged to forward the survey web link to other writers and/or to post the survey on writing listservs in which they participate.
Procedure: Due to financial limitations, the MBTI was not administered to survey participants in this study. Rather, participants were instructed to take the Cognitive Style Inventory (see Appendix C), an online self-scoring inventory which allows people to approximate their MBTI scores quickly and without cost by self-identifying with brief listed descriptions and characteristics of each preference choice (Reinhold). The Cognitive Style Inventory was created by Ross Reinhold, researcher and qualified administrator of the MBTI, not as a substitute for the MBTI but as an introduction to it.
The survey was built online at SurveyMonkey.com, and the web link was emailed to a number of professional writers with a deadline to complete the survey three weeks from the time of email. Survey participants could choose to be entered into a raffle to win a $200 gift card to Amazon. The survey questions asked writers to identify their primary genre and their four-letter personality type (see Appendix B) so that these two variables could be investigated for associations.
The primary genres listed as choices on this survey are a reflection of the basic genre differentiations typical in college-level writing courses: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Once the survey deadline had passed, all survey data were tallied by the indices of genre and personality (see Table 1). Fisher’s Exact Test was then performed with the help of employees in the University Math Center in order to determine if any relationships of statistical significance had been found between the personality categories and the genre categories.