Personality assessment in a diverse urban sample.

Personality traits – our characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving – have been implicated in disease progression and health outcomes. In particular, the traits that define the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, are associated with inflammation (Chapman et al., 2009; Sutin et al., 2010), obesity (Sutin, Ferrucci, Zonderman, & Terracciano, 2011), cardiovascular disease (Strike & Steptoe, 2004), and, ultimately, longevity (Kern & Friedman, 2008; Terracciano, Lockenhoff, Zonderman, Ferrucci, & Costa, 2008). The pervasiveness of these traits and their relevance to health outcomes make them a promising avenue for examining the role of psychological factors in health in vulnerable populations. Some traits, for example, may ameliorate health disparities, whereas others may exacerbate them. To address questions about the role of personality in health outcomes across different demographic groups, it is imperative to have a measurement tool that assesses these traits reliably in the populations of interest. Personality measures have typically been constructed and validated using college students or other educated adults (Costa & McCrae, 1992; John & Srivastava, 1999). Less research has addressed the psychometric properties of established personality measures in ethnically and socioeconomically diverse populations, especially among those with low levels of literacy. The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) is a well-replicated measure of FFM personality traits (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Cross-cultural evidence suggests that the NEO-PI-R reliably assesses personality traits across different populations and that nations as diverse as Burkina Faso and Iceland share a similar factor structure to the normative American structure (McCrae et al., 2005). These studies, however, despite their diversity of culture, typically rely on college students at respondents. Thus, despite providing knowledge about the universal structure of personality, they do not address personality assessment in populations that vary greatly in literacy. Data quality and the factor structure of the NEO-PI-R tend to be similar across sex and age (Costa & McCrae, 1992) but may vary across other demographic groups. African American samples, for example, tend to have a higher percentage of NEO-PI-R assessments judged invalid and higher acquiescence (i.e., the tendency to agree with items regardless of their content; Savla, Davey, Costa, & Whitfield, 2007). Invalidity and acquiescence, however, may be more strongly related to education than to ethnicity (Lockenhoff et al., 2008). Internal consistency of the five personality factors tend to be slightly lower among African Americans (Savla et al., 2007) and in populations with lower levels of education, regardless of ethnicity (Lockenhoff et al., 2008). Finally, congruence with the normative factor structure tends to be fairly high, but African American samples have slightly lower congruence coefficients for Extraversion and Openness to Experience, suggesting that perhaps the items in these domains do not measure these traits as well for African Americans as for White participants (Salva et al., 2007). Less research has addressed the issue of literacy in personality assessment. The factor structure of the NEO-PI-R has been clearly replicated in samples with lower levels of education (Allik & McCrae, 2004; Trobst et al., 2000). Although related, literacy and education are not equivalent, and in some domains literacy may be more important than education in predicting outcomes of interest (e.g., cognitive performance; Byrd, Jacobs, Hilton, Stern, & Manly, 2005). Personality assessment relies heavily on the respondent’s ability to comprehend and respond to the meaning of the items. Data quality and factor structure may thus be compromised for individuals with lower levels of literacy who may have difficulty understanding questions about their personality. The present research examines the data quality and factor structure of personality traits measured with the NEO-PI-R in a socioeconomically diverse urban sample. In addition to the total sample, we test data quality in a number of demographic groups – African American and White participants above and below 125% of the federal poverty line – and in those with higher and lower literacy. We evaluated the assessment on several dimensions, including percentage of invalid NEO-PI-Rs, acquiescence, internal consistency, and factor congruence with the normative sample. We also performed a readability analysis on the items of the NEO by factor to determine reading level of each factor. We expected these indices to be somewhat lower in those with lower SES and lower literacy.