Personality impacts all areas of our lives; it governs who we are and how we react to life’s challenges. Personalized systems that adapt to end users should take into account the user’s personality to perform well. Several methodologies (e.g. User-as-Wizard, indirect studies) that use personality adaptation require first for personality to be conveyed to the participant; this has few validated approaches. Furthermore, measuring personality is often time consuming, prone to response bias (e.g. using questionnaires) or data intensive (e.g. using behaviour or text mining). This paper presents a methodology for creating and validating stories to convey psychological traits and for using such stories with a personality slider scale to measure these traits. We present the validation of the scale and evaluate its reliability. To evidence the validity of the methodology, we outline studies where the stories and scale have been effectively applied (in recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems, and persuasive systems).