Scores on dog personality are dependent on questionnaire : A comparison of three questionnaires

• Main Author: Henriksson, Josefine
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Biologi 2016
• Subjects: Personality; Questionnaire; Dogs; Behaviour; Canis lupus familiaris; Validity; Reliability; Canis lupus
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-129821

Personality in dogs have been studied relatively extensive the last couple of years with various methods. One of these methods is questionnaire for owners to fill in. A credible and well working questionnaire is characterized by a high reliability and validity. In this study three different questionnaires, MCPQ-R, DPQ and C-BARQ have been used and compared. Dog owners were asked to fill in all three questionnaires for their dog. Correlation between factors in the questionnaires and differences between age groups, breeds and sexes were analyzed to see if these questionnaires differed from each other. The result indicated various correlations that were both expected and unexpected as well as differences between age groups, breeds and sexes. Factors from all three questionnaires were sometimes considered more reliable than the other but DPQ had the most reliable ones. In the comparison between breeds no factor from C-BARQ was significant while several from the DPQ were. These factors also showed a similar result as a previous study. The C-BARQ factors contained a lot of unexpected correlations which lowered its reliability. MCPQ-R on the other hand was measuring personality in a very unspecific and broad way. Therefore, DPQ seem to be the most reliable questionnaire when taking all results from this study into consideration. However, improvements like clarify value-loaded words and perhaps by adding more aspects of dog personality needs to be done to minimize misunderstanding and lacking aspects.