Category Archives: Temperament research

The Gender and Temperament Gaps we saw in our April poll are consistent. President Obama still commands a large lead over Governor Romney among women, Idealists, and Rationals. In fact, the only segment of the US voting population that favors Romney is Guardian men. The two candidates are evenly balanced among Artisan men.

We initially randomly surveyed 1000 adult US registered voters who are planning on voting in November between May 28 and June 1. The sample population was balanced according to US 2010 Census data by age group, gender, and geographic region. Our data showed such a wide gap between the two candidates that we ran the poll again during the week of June 5-10. The results of both polls were consistent. These results vary substantially from most current polls that show Obama and Romney virtually tied. But, we stand on our numbers – for our thoughts on why this gap exists, see our previous article:  The Last Accurate Poll?

The poll results are presented below in 2 graph forms – bar graphs showing the results of the June 5-10 poll, and line charts showing the tracking from the first poll (May 28-June 1) to the second. We will continue to run our poll on a monthly basis (or ad hoc interim polls if events warrant), so the tracking graphs will show changes as we get closer to the election.

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A recent study by the Pew Research Center confirmed what professional pollsters have known since 1997:  the traditional political poll, conducted by telephone, is becoming irrelevant.  In fact, the most accurate result to come from telephone surveys, is the statistics on the efficacy of telephone-based polls.  It turns out that less than 9% of people pollsters attempt to contact by phone actually participate in their surveys.

At Keirsey Research we first suspected the accuracy of telephone-based surveys 4 years ago when we noticed the wild fluctuation in the national polls during the 3 months prior to the November 2008 election.  The variance in these polls is now so great that pollsters have taken to running “polls of polls” – that is, they average all the different polls hoping to get to an accurate result.  What they end up with is a “poll” that shows narrower gaps between the candidates than actually exist.  Most pollsters are currently showing the race between President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney  as statistically tied (National popular vote).  Keirsey Research shows that this is quite inaccurate, and Mitt Romney has major concerns.

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Link:  We mistakenly included the incorrect link in the July Personalityzone newsletter  Click here to go to the article:   Keirsey Research 2012 Election Tracking Poll: The Temperament Gap Holds Steady

Good news!  Despite conventional wisdom, and many alarmist essays to the contrary, reading for pleasure is still a popular pastime both in the U.S. and the rest of the world. (For a taste of the “alarmist essays to the contrary”, google “death of reading” and wade through more than 1.3 million results.)

Keirsey Research recently surveyed 3,311 people who had completed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II at Keirsey.com to first find out if “the death of reading” is in fact imminent, and to see if there are significant differences in the reading habits of the 4 Temperaments.  We were specifically interested in peoples’ reading habits when it comes to books, as opposed to other media such as magazines, newspapers, websites, etc.

As noted in the opening paragraph, the answer to our first question is an emphatic “No!”  Almost 80% of our respondents tell us they enjoy reading books, and almost three quarters of them like to read for the pleasure of it.  Less than 20% consider book reading to be “unimportant” to them, more than 55% have read a complete book in the past month, and more than half are currently reading a book.  It seems that, even with the proliferation of screens in the world, there is still a lot of book reading going on.

The second of our objectives – to see if there are significant differences between the 4 Temperaments when it comes to reading habits – found that the answer is yes.  However, gender also plays a big part: women are much more avid readers as a gender than are men.  Perhaps this is not a surprise – it does seem that most book clubs (Oprah’s being the most famous) are comprised predominantly of women.  A guardian friend of mine, a male, pointed out to me, “They need something to do while I’m watching football / baseball / basketball / hockey / MMA / (ad infinitum) on TV.”

After the jump, we get into specifics:  which Temperament reads the most?  Which is the most likely to be found at a public library?   Do the different Temperaments prefer different genres?  Who is more likely to go to a bookstore and buy a book?  Given a choice of books or TV, who would be more likely to choose books?  Who would be more likely to choose TV?  Make your guesses and read on.

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