Qualitative variations in personality inventories: subjective understandings of items in a personality inventory

ABSTRACT

Most studies using personality inventories do not take individual, subjective understandings of the items into account. The present study is one of the few to have investigated the quality of individuals’ psychological processes when making the Likert-like responses often used in psychological inventories. Respondents were asked to elaborate verbally on their Likert item responses to the 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory. A common assumption about personality inventories is that there is a relatively homogenous understanding of the items and, in particular, the rating scales across respondents. However, our results suggest that the same item responses to a given item can reflect a variety of qualities across individuals’ understandings. At the same time, similar understandings and ways of relating to an item can lead to different item responses. Such findings have substantial implications for quantitative personality studies as well as quantitative survey or questionnaire studies, in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Big five
• five factor model
• Likert rating scales
• personality inventory
• qualitative

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Professor David Funder and Professor Jaan Valsiner for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of the article. Also a great thank you to Simone Johnson for the conscientious assistance with the preliminary data analysis.

Notes

¹ By “item response” we refer to respondents’ marks on a self-rating scale. In a typical inventory, respondents score themselves on a Likert scale consisting of, for example, Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neither agree nor disagree, Agree, and Strongly agree. Hence, an example of an item response could be Strongly agree.

² TIPI is a short form personality inventory that investigates how traits manifest themselves in different contexts.

³ Item numbers are labeled as BFI+item number; thus, item number 41 in the original BFI (cf. John et al. 2008) becomes BFI41.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Lundmann

Lars Lundmann is a psychologist and holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen. Today Lars works with meta-recruitment, i.e. helping recruiters becoming better in their processes. Lars’ primary interests concern theory of science, personality judgment, and recruitment practices. Lars has a critical approach to investigations of these areas. Teaching areas include personality psychology, work and organizational psychology and human resource management.

Jakob Waag Villadsen

Jakob Waag Villadsen is a PhD fellow at the Copenhagen Center of Cultural Life Course Studies, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His primary attention is on early childhood development in educational settings, focusing upon subjectivity: how it emerges, develops, and perseveres in the cultural life course of the individual–lived and shared with others. Besides his PhD work, he lectures in courses of community psychology and co-coordinates the course of developmental psychology.