Do you believe that you control your life, or do you feel that it is controlled by other people and events? In the Child of our Time programme, The Making Of Me, we saw that the parents differed in how much they felt in command of their lives.

Julian Rotter coined the phrase ‘locus of control’ in the 1960s. It’s about how much we feel a sense of our own agency and power to affect what happens to us. He argued that people differ consistently in how they attribute causes to either their own acts or to external forces. Rotter found that we tend to blame outside factors when things go wrong, yet we tend to take the credit when things go well.

It is also believed to be a personality characteristic: some people are ‘internalisers’ and have a strong sense that they control their lives, while other people, ‘externalisers’, feel much more subject to the vagaries of fate. Being one or the other of these is neither good nor bad, although extreme externalising may lead to a sense of helplessness and extreme internalising may lead to anxiety.

Take our 'Locus of Control' test to see if you are an ‘internaliser’ or an ‘externaliser’. The test is based on Julian Rotter's Locus of Control Scale published in Psychological Monographs, Volume 80, 1966.