Review: "Questionnaire" by Evan Kindley

Questionnaire by Evan Kindley
Published 2016 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

The humble questionnaire: whether at the doctor's office or while wasting time on Buzzfeed, we've all been subject to our fair share. Here, although he discusses a range of questionnaires, Kindley zeroes in on those designed to look at personality...for various reasons, and with various results.

This is part of Objects Lessons, a Bloomsbury Academic series investigating the lives and histories of ordinary objects. The first I read from the series, Pregnancy Test, was largely straightforward—history plus cultural context—and this is largely similar in setup (...history plus cultural context...) but ends up feeling as though it has had to take a more targeted direction. These are short books, and there's a limit to how many types of questionnaire, and how many of the surrounding concerns and things to think about, Kindley could cover.

By and large, I found the first half of this book more interesting than the second, as the development of different questionnaires and what scientists have made of the results is...engaging, to say the least. (Let's just say that the idea of scientific rigour has changed over the years.) Towards the end, Kindley dates the book badly by zeroing in on Buzzfeed quizzes and privacy concerns—privacy concerns are definitely not a dated concept, and Buzzfeed is still alive and kicking, but it's also taken a kicking or two since this book was published. There are some terrifically funny details throughout the book (apparently, on OkCupid, "the answer to the question 'Do you like the taste of beer?' is more predictive than any other of whether you're willing to have sex on a first date" (94)—god, the data people at OkCupid must be able to run such weird and interesting data through all sorts of things), but I found myself wishing that I'd read this when Buzzfeed still felt current.