Big Five Trait Theory

The Big Five Trait Theory is used to describe the five core traits of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits are often used to help predict relationships between different personality types, as well as predictors of success in different aspects of life (Psychology Today, 2018).
Ackerman (2017) argues that the Big 5 traits have been verified across different cultures and countries, thus making them relatively neutral in terms of culture bias, and findings involving the traits to be more or less universal.
In practice, the Big 5 is used in settings such as human resources departments, rather than as a comprehensive explanation of personality. For example, conscientiousness was found to be reliably correlated with success in the workplace, moreso than other traits. So an HR department might run an entire test but only be looking for a high conscientiousness score. The Big 5 trait theory is not sufficient to encompass all aspects of a personality, however. They might be the "Big 5" but even if one accepts that proposition that does not mean that they are the only five aspects of personality, just that they are easy to define and to test for. The reality is that there are more than five types of people in this world, and this test is often overly simplistic in terms of how it describes a person.
Taking the Big 5 personality test is one thing – anybody can take a test – but if it is being used for anything that matters – like a job application – then I would not. When one looks at the scientific study of the Big 5 traits, the meta-analyses focus on linking the traits to things like job satisfaction, subjective well-being, transformational leadership, artistic creativity, substance abuse disorders and those sorts of things. Examining links between the Big 5 traits and specific outcomes is not unreasonable, but there do not appear to be any studies that test who accurate the Big 5 test is. To me, if you are going to distill my essence down to a quiz, then I would rather than this quiz be scientifically proven to have a high rate of accuracy. I'm not interested in being judged on the basis of a test that isn't going to accurately reflect who I am, and to this point the studies on Big 5 appear to have shied away from actually examining if the test has any merit.
One of the issues with this test in particular – having taken it – is that the questions are sometimes poorly written. They are oversimplified, black-and-white, leaving out room for context and nuance. That reduces the accuracy of the results. Take a question like "I often forget to put things back in their proper place." First, often is ill-defined, making the question open to some interpretation. But then there is the question of 'proper place'. Do things even have a proper place? Some things might, but other things do not. Someone living on their own is perfectly free to reject the very idea that there is a proper place. I've seen questions about following the rules – but what does that say. Some people don't follow the rules but fail to realize this. Some people don't follow the rules because they genuinely don't care. Some people evaluate each rule individually on its own merits, rejecting only some rules if they do not make sense. Are we to accept that all rules have equal merit? This is my problem with the overly simplistic questions that are usually used in the Big 5 examination – they just don't yield reliable answers, because there are too many instances of subjective wording or questions that gloss over the reality of nuance and complexity.
The short answer is no, I have no interest in doing the Big 5 test in a meaningful situation. The test is often poorly written, and it has never been demonstrated to be accurate in assessing personality. The findings that come from Big 5 are very much limited to a handful of areas, and even these can be left to interpretation by people who don't completely understand what the test is and how it should be applied. Think of an HR department that rejects a writer for not having a high conscientiousness score. The problem is that editors need to score well on that measure, but writers can actually be quite terrible at this, and still be brilliant writers. There is just way too much room for error in this test to trust any serious decision to its findings.


References

Ackerman, C. (2017). The big five personality theory: The 5 factor explained Positive Psychology Program. Retrieved March 14, 2018 from https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/big-five-personality-theory/

Psychology Today (2018). Big 5 personality traits. Psychology Today. Retrieved March 14, 2018 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/big-5-personality-traits