Yes, in the sense the test measures. Patience as slowness to anger is a stable trait that can be measured: it sits inside agreeableness in the HEXACO model of personality, and inside neuroticism, as the anger facet, in the Big Five.

Two meanings of patience

The word covers two things. One is temper: how much it takes to make you angry, and how readily irritation arises. The other is waiting: staying with a slow task or a delayed reward. The ten statements are the IPIP version of the HEXACO patience facet, and every one of them is about temper, such as Find that it takes a lot to make me feel angry at someone and Rarely get irritated, with reversed statements such as Lose my temper. You rate each on five points, the reversed ones are flipped, and the ten are added, so a score runs from 10 to 50. The IPIP key page gives coefficient alpha of .88 for the scale, and no norms have been published for it on its own. The waiting kind of patience is closer to perseverance, which has its own test and its own guide.

What the research finds

Ashton and Lee (2005) describe how the HEXACO model moves even temper out of neuroticism and into agreeableness, so that HEXACO agreeableness is made of forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility and patience, while Big Five agreeableness keeps trust, cooperation, modesty and the rest. Pease and Lewis (2015) found that anger comes from a combination: high neuroticism supplies the readiness to feel it, and low agreeableness the readiness to show it. Schnitker (2012) treats patience as a trait with three faces, patience with people, with hardship and with daily hassles, and found that each went with higher well-being; patience with people is the one this scale is nearest to. Neuroticism, the domain that holds the anger facet, falls on average through adulthood (Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer, 2006).

What it is not

It is not the same as being kind, forgiving or easy-going. Those are separate facets, and a person can be slow to anger and still hold a grudge.

It is not a measure of what you do when angry. The scale asks how readily anger arises, not whether you shout, sulk or say nothing.

It is not patience with waiting, slow progress or long projects.

A low score is not a character flaw. Quick-tempered people are often quick to make up.

What it means for your results

A high score means it takes a lot to make you angry; a low score means irritation comes easily. With no norms for the scale alone, the marker shows where your answers fell in the possible range, not where you stand against other people. The 120-item Big Five test scores the same tendency as the anger facet of neuroticism against a sample of over 400,000 people.

The patience test takes two minutes, is scored on your device and shows your score on the strip.