NEO-4 Personality Inventory: Annotated Bibliography

Overview of the NEO-4 Personality Inventory

The NEO Personality Inventory–4 (NEO-4) was formulated by adapting the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). While the NEO-PI-R provides information on five personality domains — Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Neuroticism — the NEO-4 covers only four of these domains. The omitted domain is Neuroticism. The developers of the NEO-4 have indicated that the test is suitable for use in employment and personal counseling settings involving activities such as career development, career counseling, and employee training, which are the contexts these four domains primarily address.

The four domains used in the NEO-4 yield information about many aspects of an individual's personality. According to the test's developers, it is possible to interpret the four domains at the global factor level. There are six personal styles that can be interpreted from these domains: interactions, interests, attitudes, activity, learning, and character. Because the test is multifaceted, it offers an opportunity to describe many positive and negative personality characteristics in a manner that is readily acceptable to the individual. Together, the four domains cover a wide range of personality attributes, which makes this test competitive with other available measures. Using the test, practitioners can identify a person's traits and present information relating to that person's strengths and weaknesses.

The test developers have provided materials that support a respected, comprehensive, and well-established personality assessment for adolescents and adults. Materials included are a reusable item booklet, a profile form, a hand-scorable carbonless answer sheet, a summary form for the client, and a booklet containing the six personal style graphs. The annotations below focus on seven peer-reviewed articles that examine the technical qualities of the NEO-4.

Annotated Bibliography

Cross-Cultural Validity of the NEO Personality Inventory

Allik, J., Church, A. T., Ortiz, F. A., Rossier, J., Hřebíčková, 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 to determine whether they would obtain the same results if they increased the sample size. The initial sample comprised 36 countries; for this study, the authors expanded it to 62 different countries (Allik et al., 2017). They were able to validate the initial research and confirmed receiving similar scores. The authors acknowledged that the test's developer receives royalties from the NEO inventories, which could represent a source of bias. The study demonstrates concurrent validity, as the NEO-4 test was used to predict outcomes that were then compared against prior results.

With the information available, and even after increasing the number of participating countries, the authors found results consistent with the initial study. The study included a total of 2,280 subscale T-scores representing 30 subscales across 76 samples. Of these, only 40 (1.75%) were smaller than 40 or larger than 60 (Allik et al., 2017). This means that in approximately 98% of the cases investigated, differences from the 1992 normative study were smaller than one standard deviation. The authors found that the standard deviation of the mean sample values remained within the same range as the original research.

Reliability After Stroke

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 to use the test to establish the reliability of personality inventories following a stroke. When a person suffers a stroke, they are prone to behavioral, physical, and cognitive impairments that affect quality of life (Dwan, Ownsworth, Donovan, & Lo, 2017). For this reason, the authors sought to determine whether the NEO-4 could reliably assess personality changes after a stroke. They noted that internal consistency for the agreeableness and openness scales was poor, likely because the test was administered while participants were still in hospital or shortly after discharge. Internal consistency reliability was used to assess the consistency of test results across multiple items within the test.

"Internal consistency for the GAI and CES-D in the current stroke sample was excellent (α = 0.93; CI = 0.90–0.96) and good (α = 0.88; CI = 0.83–0.93), respectively." The authors established that the test has sound internal consistency overall. There was also good concordance between the informant-rated and self-rated versions of the inventory.

References

Allik, J., Church, A. T., Ortiz, F. A., Rossier, J., Hřebíčková, 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.