Perseverance is the part of conscientiousness that is about effort: finishing what you start, working hard and not being sidetracked. Conscientiousness is the broader Big Five domain, which also covers being organised, dutiful, careful and confident of your own competence.
Where the scale comes from
The eight statements are the IPIP perseverance scale, written to match the perseverance strength in the character strengths classification. The IPIP key page lists ten and marks two as omitted from the scored version, so the site keeps eight, such as Don’t quit a task before it is finished and Finish things despite obstacles in the way, with reversed statements such as Give up easily. You rate each on five points, the reversed ones are flipped, and the eight are added, so a score runs from 8 to 40. The IPIP key page gives coefficient alpha of .81 for the scale. No norms have been published for it on its own.
What the research finds
Roberts and colleagues (2005) analysed seven personality questionnaires and found conscientiousness breaks into six parts: industriousness, order, self-control, responsibility, traditionalism and virtue. Perseverance is the core of industriousness, and in the 120-item test the same content appears as self-discipline and achievement-striving.
Duckworth and colleagues (2007) introduced grit, perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and reported that it predicted staying the course in several demanding settings while correlating strongly with conscientiousness. Credé, Tynan and Harms (2017) pooled the studies that followed and found that grit and conscientiousness are so closely related that they are hard to tell apart, that the perseverance of effort part does nearly all the predicting, and that grit’s link with performance is modest. The other part of grit, consistency of interest, is a different thing again: keeping the same interests over years, which is neither perseverance nor curiosity, the appetite for finding things interesting.
What it is not
It is not talent or intelligence. The scale asks whether you keep going, not how far you get.
It is not grit in full, because the scale has no statements about keeping the same interest for years.
It is not orderliness. Tidiness and finishing are separate facets.
A high score is not an unmixed good. Its cost is persisting with things that should be dropped, and a low score includes a readiness to cut losses that persistent people lack.
What it means for your results
A high score means you tend to finish what you start despite obstacles; a low score means you tend to give up or change course when a task drags on. 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 self-discipline and achievement-striving against a sample of over 400,000 people.
The perseverance test takes two minutes, is scored on your device and shows your score on the strip.