Using Principal Component Scores to Enhance the Validity and Reliability of Big Five Personality Measures
Abstract
Abstract. Varimax rotated principal component scores (VRPCS) have previously been offered as a possible solution to the non-orthogonality of scores for the Big Five factors. However, few researchers have examined the reliability and validity of VRPCS. To address this gap, we use a lab study and a field study to investigate whether using VRPCS increase orthogonality, reliability, and criterion-related validity. Compared to the traditional unit-weighting scoring method, the use of VRPCS enhanced the reliability and discriminant validity of the Big Five factors, although there was little improvement in criterion-related validity. Results are discussed in terms of the benefit of using VRPCS instead of traditional unit-weighted sum scores.
References
(2005). Turnover intentions and voluntary turnover: The moderating roles of self-monitoring, locus of control, proactive personality, and risk aversion. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 980–990. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.90.5.980
(2005). Invariance of the “NEO-PI-R” factor structure across exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Personality and Individual Differences, 38, 1879–1889. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2004.11.014
(1998). Personality and job performance: The importance of narrow traits. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 19, 289–303.
(1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance. Personnel Psychology, 44, 1–26. doi: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.1991.tb00688.x
(2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9–30. doi: 10.1111/1468-2389.00160
(1995). A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description. Psychological Bulletin, 117(2), 187–215. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.117.2.187
(2012). Know more. Guess less: Global selection forecast 2012. Pittsburgh, PA: Development Dimensions International. Available at https://www.ddiworld.com/DDIWorld/media/trend-research/globalselectionforecast2012_tr_ddi.pdf?ext=.pdf.
(1992). Assessing the five-factor model of personality description. Journal of Personality, 60, 253–293. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00974.x
(1958). Perception and communication. London, UK: Pergamon.
(1994).
Validating biodata . In G. S. StokesM. D. MumfordW. A. OwensEds., Biodata handbook. Palo Alto, CA: CPP Books.(1997). An examination of the five-factor model of normal personality variation with reliable component analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 23, 317–325. doi: 10.1016/S0191-8869(97)00020-2
(2011). The five-factor model of personality traits and organizational citizenship behaviors: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 96, 1140–1166. doi: 10.1037/a0024004
(1964). The relationship between introversion, extraversion, neuroticism and performance in school examinations. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 34, 187–196.
(1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 155–159. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155
(1992a). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
(1992b). Reply to Eysenck. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 861–865. doi: 10.1016/0191-8869(92)90002-7
(1995). Solid ground in the wetlands of personality: A reply to Block. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 216–220. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.117.2.216
(2000). Revised NEO Personality Inventory interpretive report. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Available at http://www3.parinc.com/uploads/samplerpts/NEO_PIR_IR.pdf
(2005). Confirmatory factor analysis of the NEO-PI-R equivalent IPIP inventory. Paper presented at the 20th meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Los Angeles, CA.
(2005). Nonlinear personality-performance relationships and the spurious moderating effects of traitedness. Journal of Personality, 73, 227–260.
(1996). Personality in learning and education: A review. European Journal of Personality, 10, 303–336. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0984(199612)10:5<303::AID-PER262>3.0.CO;2-2
(1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417–440. doi: 10.1146/annurev.ps.41.020190.002221
(1991). Personality and performance in “personality”: Conscientiousness and openness. Journal of Research in Personality, 25, 276–284.
(1992). Four ways five factors are not basic. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 667–673.
(1969). A test of the hypothesis that Cronbach’s alpha or Kuder-Richardson coefficient twenty is the same for two tests. Psychometrika, 34, 363–373. doi: 10.1007/BF02289364
(1980). A test of the hypothesis that Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient is the same for two tests administered to the same sample. Psychometrika, 45(1), 99–105. doi: 10.1007/BF02293600
(1999). Determining sample size for a test of the equality of alpha coefficients when the number of part-tests is small. Psychological Methods, 4, 366–377. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.4.4.366
(1924). On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics. Proceedings of the International Mathematics Congress, Toronto, 2, 805–813.
(1925). Statistical methods for research workers. London, UK: Oliver and Boyd.
(1990). An alternative “description of personality”: The big-five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216–1229.
(1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4, 26–42. doi: 10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26
(1999).
A broad-bandwidth, public-domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models . In I. MervieldeI. J. DearyF. De FruytF. OstendorfEds., Personality psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.(2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96.
(1983). Factor analysis (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(2001). A comparison of factor scores under conditions of factor obliquity. Psychological Methods, 6, 67–83. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.6.1.67
(1998). A comparison of regression and loading weights for the computation of factor scores. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 33, 221–247. doi: 10.1207/s15327906mbr3302_2
(1988). Relations of sample size to the stability of component patterns. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 265–275. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.103.2.265
(1985). A primer of multivariate statistics (2nd ed.). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
(1992). Structure coefficients versus scoring coefficients as bases for interpreting emergent variables in multiple regression and related techniques, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 356 231).
(2005). Conducting tetrad tests of model fit and contrasts of tetrad-nested models: A new SAS macro. Structural Equation Modeling, 12, 76–93.
(1993). Validating the five-factor model of personality: The Hong Kong case. Unpublished master’s thesis, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
(1995). Hogan Personality Inventory manual (2nd ed.). Tulsa, OK: Hogan Assessment Systems.
(1971). The dynamics of structured personality tests: 1971. Psychological Review, 78, 229–248. doi: 10.1037/h0030852
(1999).
The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives . In L. A. PervinO. P. JohnEds., Handbook of personality: Theory, research (2nd ed.. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.(2002). Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 530–541. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.87.3.530
(1999). Sample size in factor analysis. Psychological Methods, 4, 84–99. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.4.1.84
(1997). Tests for comparing dependent correlations revisited: A Monte Carlo study. Journal of Experimental Education, 65, 257–270. doi: 10.1080/00220973.1997.9943458
(2013). The criterion-related validity of personality measures for predicting GPA: A meta-analytic validity competition. Psychological Assessment, 25, 532–544. doi: 10.1037/a0031748
(1989a).
Different points of view: Self-reports and ratings in the assessment of personality . In J. P. ForgasJ. M. InnesEds., Recent advances in social psychology: An international perspective (pp. 429–439). North-Holland, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science.(1989b). Rotation to maximize the construct validity of factors in the NEO Personality Inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 24, 107–124. doi: 10.1207/s15327906mbr2401_7
(1992). Comparing correlated correlation coefficients. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 172–175. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.111.1.172
(1999). The Personal Characteristics Inventory manual. Libertyville, IL: Wonderlic Corporation.
(1997). Personality, academic attribution, and substance use as predictors of academic achievement in college students. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 12, 501–511.
(1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
(1998). Hierarchical organization of personality and prediction of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 538–556.
(2009). A meta-analysis of the five-factor model of personality and academic performance. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 322–328. doi: 10.1037/a0014996
(1990).
Implications of using freshman GPA as the criterion for the predictive validity of the SAT . In W. W. WillinghamEd., Predicting college grades: An analysis of institutional trends over two decades (pp. 253–288). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.(2012). Psychological correlates of university students’ academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 353–387. doi: 10.1037/a0026838
(2002).
Assessing the Big Five: Applications of 10 psychometric criteria to the development of marker scales . In B. de RaadEd., Big Five assessment (pp. 30–54). Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber.(2004). Personality and life satisfaction: A facet-level analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1062–1075. doi: 10.1177/0146167204264292
(1995). Frame-of-reference effects on personality scale scores and criterion-related validity. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 80, 607–620.
. (2003). SPSS 12.0 [Computer software]. Chicago, IL: SPSS.
(1985). Scale construction on the basis of components analysis: A comparison of three strategies. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 20, 45–55.
(1998). Effects of variable and subject sampling on factor pattern recovery. Psychological Methods, 3, 231–251. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.3.2.231
(1995). Personality as a predictor of college performance. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 55, 177–185.
