Analyzing NEO 4 Personality Test

NEO Personality Inventory – 4 (NEO-4)
This personality test was formulated by tweaking the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). While NEO-PI-R provides information on the five personality domains namely Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Neuroticism, the NEO-4 only offers information on four of these domains. The omitted domain is Neuroticism. The developers of the NEO-4 test have indicated that the test is suitable for use in employment and personal counseling settings that involve activities like career development, career counseling, and employee training. This is where these four domains mainly focus upon. The four domains used for the NEO-4 test will avail information regarding many aspects of the individual's personality. According to the developers of the test, it is possible to interpret the four domains at the global factor level. There are six personal styles that can be interpreted from the four domains. These styles are interactions, interests, attitudes, activity, learning, and character. The test being multifaceted, it offers an opportunity to describe the many positive characteristics together with the negative ones in a manner that is readily acceptable to the individual. The four domains covered by the test to cover a wide range of a person's personality. This makes the test best as compared to others. Using the test one can identify a person's traits and present the information that relates to the person's strengths and weaknesses.
The test developers have provided materials that assist in the provision of a respected, comprehensive, and well-established personality assessment for adolescents and adults. Some of the materials included are a reusable item booklet, a profile form, hand-scorable carbonless answer sheet, summary form for the client, and booklet containing the six personal style graphs. We will focus on the NEO-4 test and the paper will comprise of an annotated bibliography of seven articles that focus on technical qualities of the test.
Annotated Bibliography
Allik, J., Church, A. T., Ortiz, F. A., Rossier, J., H?ebí?ková, M., De Fruyt, F., . . . McCrae, R. R. (2017). Mean profiles of the NEO personality inventory. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(3), 402-420.
This article addresses the validity of the test. The authors aimed at uncovering if they would have the same results if they increased the sample size. The first sample size comprised of 36 countries and for this case, they increased it to 62 different countries (Allik et al., 2017). They were able to validate the initial research and they also confirmed to have received similar scores. The authors did confirm that the test author does receive royalties from the NEO inventories and this could have been a source of bias. We can see that their concurrent validity for this particular study. The authors have managed to use the NEO-4 test to predict the outcomes of their study. With the information that was currently available, even after increasing the number of participating countries, the authors had similar results as was the case with the initial study. The study had a total of 2,280 subscale T-scores representing 30 subscales by 76 samples, and out of these only 40 (1.75%) were smaller than 40 or they were larger than 60 (Allik et al., 2017). What this data means is that in about 98% of the cases that were investigated, the differences from the initial study that was conducted in 1992 norms were smaller than one standard deviation. The authors found that the standard deviation of the mean sample values was within the same range.
Dwan, T., Ownsworth, T., Donovan, C., & Lo, A. H. Y. (2017). Reliability of the NEO Five Factor Inventory short form for assessing personality after stroke. International Psychogeriatrics, 29(7), 1157-1168.
This article addresses the reliability of the test. The authors aimed at using the test to establish the reliability of personality inventories after a person suffers a stroke. When a person suffers a stroke, they are prone to behavioral, physical, and cognitive impairments, which do affect the individual's quality of life (Dwan, Ownsworth, Donovan, & Lo, 2017). It is for this reason that the authors wanted to establish if it is possible to use the NEO-4 test to assess personality changes after a stroke. The authors have noted that internal consistency for the test was poor for the agreeableness and openness scales. It has been indicated that the reason for this consistency could be due to the fact that the individual has suffered a stroke and the test was administered days while in the hospital or a couple of days after being discharged home. Internal consistency reliability was used by the authors for this particular study. This kind of reliability is used when a person wants to assess the consistency of test results across multiple items within a test. "Internal consistency for the GAI and CES-D in the current stroke sample was excellent (?=0.93; CI=0.90–0.96) and good (?=0.88; CI=0.83–0.93), respectively." The authors have established that the test has sound internal consistency. There was also good concordance between the informant and self-rated versions.
Helle, A. C., & Mullins-Sweatt, S. N. (2017). Maladaptive personality trait models: Validating the five-factor model maladaptive trait measures with the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 and NEO Personality Inventory. Assessment, 1073191117709071.
Validity for NEO-4 test is what this article is offering. The authors aimed to offer further validity to the test as an extension of general personality traits. They also offered evidence for their relation to the pathological trait model. Helle and Mullins-Sweatt (2017) wanted to determine the overlap between normative and maladaptive personality trait models. It is noted that the study made use of a student sample and this could have affected the generalizability of the results. The authors also note that they made use of a small healthy sample. With a small sample, it is hard for the results to be replicated and they have stated that future research should aim at increasing the study sample. Construct validity is the specific type of validity that was used for this article. The authors wanted to determine how well NEO-4 measures up to its claims. The NEO-4 is designed to measure personality traits and this was clearly shown in the study conducted. The results indicate that there were corresponding NEO-4 facets with the maladaptive scale. 25 out of 26 maladaptive trait scales had significant relationships with their respective NEO-4 domain facets. This is the validation of the NEO-4 test and gives it support on its ability to address general personality traits and pathological personality traits. Confirming the validity of the test is vital for future research using the test since there are numerous articles that have managed to demonstrate how vital the test can be to the determination of personality traits.
McAbee, S. T., & Oswald, F. L. (2013). The criterion-related validity of personality measures for predicting GPA: A meta-analytic validity competition. Psychological assessment, 25(2), 532.
The validity of the NEO-4 test is what was being examined in this article. The authors aimed at using the NEO-4 test to establish the personality traits that could be used to predict academic performance outcomes of students. There has been increased interest in the study of GPA and numerous studies have been conducted with this aim in mind. This enabled the authors to have enough meta-analyses for them to use to summarize their research. The study made use of 51 previous studies that had been conducted between 1992 and 2010. The studies contained 274 correlations that the authors could use. The article being a meta-analysis does determine the reliability estimates. McAbee and Oswald (2013) have shown that their results are almost similar to those of other authors who have conducted meta-analyses in the past. However, there is a difference in that the past articles have been combining a variety of alternative personality measures with the assumption that they reflect the same personality traits for predicting the outcomes. This was wrong and the best way of doing this would be to compare the different personality measures, which is what this article is doing. The specific type of validity is external validity. This is because the authors were generalizing their results. The authors discovered that conscientiousness had the highest operational validity as compared to the other three personality traits. It was established that only the NEO-4 test that included reliable facet-level scales. This meant that the researchers were not able to compare facets across the different measures.
McCrae, R. R., Kurtz, J. E., Yamagata, S., & Terracciano, A. (2011). Internal consistency, retest reliability, and their implications for personality scale validity. Personality and social psychology review, 15(1), 28-50.
This article aimed at examining the reliability and validity of the facet scales for NEO inventories. It mostly assumed that scale reliability does limit validity. For the NEO inventories, there are some facets that more reliable than others and this is called differential reliability. This makes it possible for researchers to test how much reliability does limit validity (McCrae, Kurtz, Yamagata, & Terracciano, 2011). The authors aimed at determining how the NEO inventories affect each other. It is not clear why some traits are intrinsically more heritable, more consensually valid, or more stable than others. The authors have stated that this should be a subject for future research. Having not identified this leaves some questions an unanswered for the reader. The article has clearly indicated that it used retest reliability. This is because they aimed at determining the consistency of their measure over time. McCrae et al. (2011) predicted that there should be no considerable changes in the results obtained and using test-retest reliability was the best way to determine this. It also allowed them to determine the validity of the NEO inventories. The results have indicated that retest reliability is strongly related to differential validity and internal consistency is unrelated. The facets of NEO inventories are robust and they can be generalized across ages, genders, and methods of measurement. The psychometric properties are also similar across many cultural contexts and this does indicate that personality traits might be a part of universal human nature. The results confirmed the authors' prediction and they were able to determine the reliability of the test. They also confirmed its validity.
Stepp, S. D., Yu, L., Miller, J. D., Hallquist, M. N., Trull, T. J., & Pilkonis, P. A. (2012). Integrating competing dimensional models of personality: Linking the SNAP, TCI, and NEO using Item Response Theory. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 3(2), 107.
The authors of this article were addressing the validity of the NEO-4 test. This was done by the understanding of the authors that there are a variety of dimensional personality inventories out there. Their aim was to determine if it is possible to map these personality inventories to each other and establish if the results for one would be similar to the others (Stepp et al., 2012). The authors have noted that they were not able to link all the available competing dimensional personality inventories. They only managed to link 18 and they consider this to be a small subset. It was indicated that they would forge ahead to link the other dimensional personality inventories. With continued linkages, people will now have an integrated measurement tool for use. The authors' aim was not to combine the tools but rather to establish the performance of each tool with advantages and disadvantages for each tool that was mapped. Content validity is a specific type of validity that was used for this study. This is because the authors wanted to estimate how a measure would represent every single element of the construct. The authors aimed at determining if it is possible to link the personality inventories and this was possible even if the test used for the study was different. This indicates that one can use a different test and still be able to link the results to another test. "Summed scores of the item pools were computed and examined for each personality dimension. The mean of the summed scores for the 214 Antagonism items was 41.51 (SD = 14.59) for the total sample, 43.31 (SD = 13.66) for the student sample, and 34.42 (SD = 15.97) for the nonstudent sample.
Takahashi, M., Shirayama, Y., Muneoka, K., Suzuki, M., Sato, K., & Hashimoto, K. (2013). Low openness on the revised NEO personality inventory as a risk factor for treatment-resistant depression. PLoS ONE, 8(9), e71964.
The authors of this article were addressing the validity of the NEO-4 test. Having already conducted a study for identifying risk factors for treatment-resistant depression, the authors wanted to determine if they would be able to find the same results using the NEO-4 test. This was possible and the authors even identified a new trait that they indicated should also be included as a risk factor for treatment-resistant depression. The discovered trait was low openness on the NEO scale. The article does not address sources of error variance, evidence of reliability, or reliability estimates. Construct validity was used for this article. The authors wanted to use the NEO test because previous studies have always shown positive results. Though no one had studied the impact of treatment-resistant depression, it was vital that for the authors to confirm their initial results and to determine if they would have similar results (Takahashi et al., 2013). The test does measure up to its claims as the authors discovered. Patients who have treatment-resistant depression did have significant high scores for neuroticism and low scores for openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness on the NEO. This is in comparison to the healthy controls that were used for this study. Even when compared to patients with remitted depression, the results still indicated that patients with treatment-resistant depression had similar results as indicated above. Therefore, it is clear that treatment-resistant depression causes low openness.


References
Allik, J., Church, A. T., Ortiz, F. A., Rossier, J., H?ebí?ková, M., De Fruyt, F., . . . McCrae, R. R. (2017). Mean profiles of the NEO personality inventory. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(3), 402-420.
Dwan, T., Ownsworth, T., Donovan, C., & Lo, A. H. Y. (2017). Reliability of the NEO Five Factor Inventory short form for assessing personality after stroke. International Psychogeriatrics, 29(7), 1157-1168.
Helle, A. C., & Mullins-Sweatt, S. N. (2017). Maladaptive personality trait models: Validating the five-factor model maladaptive trait measures with the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 and NEO Personality Inventory. Assessment, 1073191117709071.
McAbee, S. T., & Oswald, F. L. (2013). The criterion-related validity of personality measures for predicting GPA: A meta-analytic validity competition. Psychological assessment, 25(2), 532.
McCrae, R. R., Kurtz, J. E., Yamagata, S., & Terracciano, A. (2011). Internal consistency, retest reliability, and their implications for personality scale validity. Personality and social psychology review, 15(1), 28-50.
Stepp, S. D., Yu, L., Miller, J. D., Hallquist, M. N., Trull, T. J., & Pilkonis, P. A. (2012). Integrating competing dimensional models of personality: Linking the SNAP, TCI, and NEO using Item Response Theory. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 3(2), 107.
Takahashi, M., Shirayama, Y., Muneoka, K., Suzuki, M., Sato, K., & Hashimoto, K. (2013). Low openness on the revised NEO personality inventory as a risk factor for treatment-resistant depression. PLoS ONE, 8(9), e71964.