What Kind of Listener Are You?
Communication style measured at the half that most tests ignore
Most communication style tests measure how you talk. This one measures how you listen, which is the half where misunderstandings actually happen. People listen for different things - one person is tracking how you feel, another is tracking whether the argument holds, a third is waiting for the action point - and two people listening for different things can have the same conversation and leave with different memories of it.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you listen normally, not about how you listen to the person you love most.
What it measures
Four listening goals. Relational listening attends to the person and how they feel. Analytical listening holds off judgement and takes in the whole picture first. Task-oriented listening wants the point, efficiently. Critical listening evaluates whether what is being said actually stands up. These are goals rather than abilities, and most people have two that dominate.
Based on: Listening Styles Profile-Revised (Bodie, Worthington & Gearhart, 2013)
Possible results
Relational listening
Listening for the person rather than the content.
Analytical listening
Taking the whole picture before forming a view.
Task-oriented listening
Listening for the point and what to do about it.
Critical listening
Checking whether what is said actually holds up.
Common questions
Which style is the best one?
None of them, and that is not a diplomatic answer. Each style is the right one for a particular conversation: critical listening is what you want from a colleague reviewing a plan and the worst possible thing to receive from a friend at a funeral. The competence being measured elsewhere in this literature is not having a good style, it is switching between them on purpose.
My partner says I do not listen. What does this tell me?
Look at your relational score against your task score. The most common version of this complaint is not deafness, it is a mismatch: one person listening for what to do about it and the other wanting to be accompanied while they feel it. Both are listening hard. Only one of them is listening for what is being asked for, and the fix is usually a single question at the start - do you want help with this, or do you want me to hear it?
Can listening be improved?
Yes, more reliably than most communication skills, because the useful techniques are concrete rather than attitudinal. Saying back what you understood before replying is the one with the most evidence behind it - not as a politeness, but because it forces you to have actually built the other person's meaning rather than assumed it. It also slows you down enough for the analytical style to get a turn.
Sources
- Bodie, G. D., Worthington, D. L., & Gearhart, C. C. (2013). The Listening Styles Profile-Revised (LSP-R): A scale revision and evidence for validity. Communication Quarterly.
- Watson, K. W., Barker, L. L., & Weaver, J. B. (1995). The Listening Styles Profile (LSP-16): Development and validation of an instrument to assess four listening styles. International Journal of Listening.
- Worthington, D. L., & Bodie, G. D. (eds.) (2017). Listening Styles Profile-Revised (LSP-R), in The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures. Wiley-Blackwell.
An honest note Worth being precise about what this measures. It reports your listening goals - what you are trying to get out of a conversation - and not your listening skill. Somebody can score high on relational listening and still be poor at it, and self-reported listening ability is known to correlate weakly with how well people actually recall and understand what was said. Also worth knowing: the earlier and much more widely copied version of this questionnaire had poor reliability, and the revised four-factor version used here was built specifically to fix that. If you have taken a listening styles test before and got a different answer, the older instrument is the likely reason.