Hi Charlotte,

If I understand correctly you want to asses three groups: successful assistance dogs, failed, and companion dogs. I can't tell from what you've written if you want a one-time assessment or long-term so I've tried to give a broad answer.

Surveys are my preferred method as you can send them out to a lot of people, check reliability easily, and collect them over time. I believe the CBARQ is one of the most commonly used surveys for dog personality. Surveys are nice as you can get a broad measure of their personality with little fuss.

I've also used temperament tests, which are fairly common in the literature. This takes more time but a lot of people prefer behavior as they think it's less anthropormophic than observer ratings (personally, I disagree with this). There's a bunch of standard tests that you can do and then code and group the behavioral response. If you're doing long term tests then you can retest the dogs for consistency (though you can do this with surveys too).

I would also say that how much you can conclude will be related to if you're looking at puppies or adults as you may not be able to draw a causal conclusion with adults but can discuss associations/overall differences.

Hope that helps a bit, sounds like an interesting project!

Best,

Lauren

Thank you very much for that. I was considering using CBARQ, so it is extremely useful to have a recommendation.

I am planning to use adult dogs (2-8 yrs roughly) to include full trained dogs and exclude any behaviour that might be due to geriatric cognitive impairment. Practical and time constraints (I am working full time to fund the study!) mean that I will not be able to undertake more than one survey.

Open to other suggestions though!

Human body spray can be helpful.