From Traits to Tendencies: A Comprehensive Analysis of How Personality Architecture Shapes Habitual Behavior

This dataset comprises the complete raw survey responses from a cross-sectional quantitative study titled “From Traits to Tendencies: Exploring How Personality Shapes Habitual Behavior”. It includes anonymized data from 412 adult participants (aged 18+) who completed an online questionnaire examining the relationships between the Big Five personality traits and general habitual tendencies.
The study tested the hypothesis that core personality architecture (measured via the Big Five Inventory) significantly predicts routine behaviour, automaticity, compulsivity, preference for regularity, and aversion to novelty. Data were collected using Qualtrics and consist of:
Demographic variables: Age, gender (Male/Female/Prefer not to say/Prefer to self-describe), highest level of education achieved, and informed consent.
Big Five Inventory (BFI): 44 items (5-point Likert scale, 1 = Disagree strongly to 5 = Agree strongly) covering Extraversion (8 items), Agreeableness (9), Conscientiousness (9), Neuroticism (8), and Openness to Experience (10). Items are labelled Q8_1 through Q8_44.
Creature of Habit (COH) Scale: 27 items (5-point Likert scale) measuring routine and automaticity in everyday behaviours (Q13_1 to Q13_27).
Habitual Tendencies Questionnaire (HTQ): 11 items (7-point Likert scale) assessing compulsivity (4 items), preference for regularity (4 items), and aversion to novelty (3 items) (Q14_1 to Q14_11).
Qualtrics metadata: Progress, Duration (in seconds), Finished (true/false), RecordedDate, ResponseId, DistributionChannel, UserLanguage, and a final computed Score column.

Key characteristics

Total valid completed responses: 412 (as reported in the associated publication).
Incomplete/in-progress responses are retained for transparency (Finished = false).
All responses are fully anonymised; no personally identifiable information is present.
Response format preserves original Likert-scale text labels (e.g., “Strongly agree”, “Mildly disagree”) as entered by participants.
File format: Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) containing a single sheet with column headers and raw data rows.