Measurement of Big Five Personality Traits

Program: BS Psychology

Subject: Practical in Psychological Assessment

Semester: 5th

Submitted by: Ayesha Noor

Roll No: 20108

Submitted to: Supervisor Miss Nighat Gul

Head of Department: Miss Iffat Gulab

Session: 2020-2024

GOVERNMENT POSTGRADUATE COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, HARIPUR

 Table of Content

S. No Topics Page no

1. Chapter1: Introduction 3

2. Literature Review 6

3. Theoretical Framework 8

4. Rationale 12

5. Objectives 13

6. Chapter 2 Methods 14

7. Problem Statement 14

8. Operational Definition of Variables 14

9. Demographical Variable 14

10. Procedure 15

11. Chapter 3 Results 17

12. Discussion 17

13. References 19

14. Appendix A 20
 Chapter 1

Introduction

The Big Five personality test is a widely accepted personality test theory. The Big Five

personality test, also known as the OCEAN personality test, is based on the Big Five model that

defines human personality as the combination of 5 personality traits or factors – Openness,

Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion and Neuroticism (making the acronym –

OCEAN). The Big Five personality test is based on a continuum wherein individuals are ranked

on a scale between two extreme ends.

Big Five Personality Traits

The big five personality traits, often refered to as OCEAN, and sometimes CANOE, are:

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These five traits

represent broad domains of human behavior and account for differences in both personality and

decision making.

 Openness to experience: Sometimes called intellect or imagination, this represents the

willingness to try new things and think outside the box. Traits include insightfulness,

originality and curiosity.

 Consientiousness: The desires to be careful, diligent and to regulate immediate

gratification with self discipline. Traits include ambition, discipline, consistency and

reliability.
  Extroversion: A state where an individual draws energy from others and seeks social

connections or interactions, as opposed to being alone (introversion). Traits include being

outgoing, energetic and confident.

 Agreeableness: The measures of how an individual interacts with others, characterised

by degree of compassion and co-operation. Traits include tractfulness, kindness and

loyalty.

 Neuroticism: A tendency towards negative personality traits, emotional instability and

self-destructive thinking. Traits include pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and fearfulness.

The Big Five personality test describes people based on their standing on five broad

personality traits. The Big Five personality test is commonly used in the corporate world as it is

known to predict important job-related outcomes, such as job performance, a person’s potential

for burnout, his/her trainability and subsequent job satisfaction.

According to the researchers at the Personality Project, personality is “the coherent pattern of

affect, cognition, and desires (goals) as they lead to behavior”. (Boyce, Wood, and powdthavce

in 2017)

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association (APA) defines personality as

“individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving”, however

you define personality, It’ is an important part of who you are. In fact, personality shows a

positive correlation with life satisfaction. With personality having such a large impact on our

lives, it’s important to have a reliable way to conceptualize and measure it. (Boyce, Wood, and

powdthavce in 2017 been done in the last decade on the individual personality traits which will

lead to certain kind of attitudes and work related behaviour. Conscientiousness personality type
includes traits such as hardworking, careful, thorough, responsible, organized, persevering

(Barrick& Mount, 1991). Conscientiousness is associated with trait adjectives such as

dependable, organized, reliable, ambitious, and hardworking (Colquitt, 2009). Extraversion

includes traits such as sociable, talkative, gregarious, assertive, active, ambitious and expressive.

(Barrick& Mount, 1991)

Literature Review

Personality represents a stable set of characteristics that are responsible for a person’s

identity. The dimensions of personality are mostly outside our control but strongly influence our

attitudes and our expectations and assumptions about others, thus influencing behaviour

(Kinicki, 2008). Colquitt (2009) defines personality traits as the structures and propensities

inside a person that explains his/her characteristic, patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour.

Personality captures what people are like and ability captures what people can do (Colquitt,

2009). Personality traits are recurring regularities or trends in a person (Colquitt, 2009).

Personality therefore represents a process of change and it relates to the psychological growth

and development of individuals. Personality factors are of extreme importance in today's

competitive organizational world. Often an unsuitable kind of personality proves disastrous and

causes undesirable tensions and worries in organization. (Kinicki, 2008)

Many researches demonstrate that there is a relationship between personality constructs

and academic performance (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2008; Conard, 2006; Saklofske,

Austin, Mastoras, Beaton, & Osborne, 2012) where Five Factor Model of personality is

considered as the most comprehensive framework for understanding personality and its traits

(Costa & MacCrae, 1992; Digman, 1990) includes i.e. openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism,
extraversion and agreeableness. Openness is the individual’s propensity to have intellectual

curiosity, active imagination, attentiveness to feelings and sensitivity to esthetics.

Conscientiousness is the tendency to be organized, ambitious, determined, reliable and

purposeful. Neuroticism is related to an individual’s inclination towards experiencing negative

effects such as guilt, anger, fear, disgust, sadness and embarrassment. Extraversion is the

tendency to be talkative, assertive, active, excited and to prefer being in large groups and to like

people. Agreeableness is the tendency to be trusting, altruistic and cooperative (Major, et.al

2006). This Five Factor Model is one of the most extensively accepted models of personality.

One of the biggest advantages of using Big Five model is that personality (as measured by Big

Five) does not substantially change and is stable over a four year period across age groups

(Cobb-Clark & Schurer, 2012).(Journal of law & Social Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, pp 10-19,

2020).

Openness to experience include traits like imaginative, cultured, curious, original, broad

minded, intelligent and artistically sensitive (Barrick& Mount, 1991). Openness has to do with

curious, imaginative, creative, complex, refined, sophisticated (Colquitt, 2009).

Baumgarten studied Klages work and assembled 4.000 descriptive terms from the

numerous dictionaries and characterologist from the German publications, and eventually his list

came down to 941 trait-descriptive adjectives. Additionally, it was Baumgarten’s work that later

inspired Allport´s and Odbert´s empirical work on the research towards trait taxonomic (John,

Angleitner&Ostendorf, 1988, p. 176).Allport&Odbert continued Galton´s work, which contained

psychophysical systems that were adaptively of the environment by defining the personality as

“the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine

his unique adjustments to his environment”(Uher, 2013, p. 5).

Theoratical Framework

Earlier theories on personality traits will be presented in the following chapter which then

led to the development of the Big Five personality model. The Big Five personality model is

thereafter briefly discussed.

Early personality trait theories

According to Revelle (2014) &Uher (2013, p. 4), Galton was one of the most significant

psychologists of the 19th century due to his research on individual differences. Galton´s ideas

about personality were quite different than those of other researchers. Galton (1884, p. 376) did

not think of individuals or personality as something that is supernatural but rather something that

has already existed andmprevious conditions were a result of that. Individuality is not something

he wanted to use in line with personality since it is not as independent as we are led to believe by

our self-consciousness. Individuals are something that has not been fully detached from the

parent source and is shaped by conditions. Still there is something that separates humans and

points to a long term variability among individuals. Galton suggests that the cells of individuals

are what contributes to the higher order of personality and its manifestation (ibid).One of

Galton’s biggest contributions to the field of psychology was the lexical hypothesis that derived

from personality traits by language sampling. He relied on a dictionary by counting words that

expressed a number of character aspects. Roget´s Thesaurus, an English language thesaurus, was

what the chose for that purpose. He studied the index and pages of it and found 1000 descriptive

words of character. (Galton, 1884, p. 181: John, Angleitner&Ostendorf, 1988, p.176).

His idea was that differences in personalities are predetermined in the language of the

culture. Hence individuals within the culture, used the language to describe individual’s
differences that were perceived salient, relevant and social in their everyday lives. The larger the

individual difference was, the more likely it was that it would be encoded in one word. Patterns

that were recurrent were especially important because those could predict future events when

there was uncertainty.Hence these individuals would identify these recurrent patterns through

their experience with the personal world. Galton was among the first to propose that different

personality traits might (Galton, 1884, p. 181: John, Angleitner&Ostendorf, 1988, p.176).Be

traced to different levels of emotional reactivity. However, it was a very modern idea at that time

and faced some technical limitations, According to Nettle (2007, p.17-19).The reduction of the

pertinent lexical repertoires down to five main dimensions received a major support in the

Western scientific communities.

However, despite the high importance it had, in addition to being the most widely used

model within the theoretical framework of personality psychology, it was never tested (Uher,

2013, p. 2-4). According to John, Angleitner&Ostendorf (1988, p.176) the limitations and

criticism that Galton´s work received was that it was systematic and therefore had little influence

on the field. Later pronounced the theoretical justification of the lexical approach and claimed

that in order to understand personality it was important to study the language.( Klages1926)

Rationale of Study

Every individual got distinct personality traits that makes him/her different from the rest

of people in the world. This student is interested to find out the individuals’ personality

differences on the basis of their traits. There are so many previous studies done for this purpose

(Cobb-Clark & Schurer, 2012) and they find good results. Also personality traits not only make

an individual different but they effect on the individuals cognitive, social, academic and
behavioral perspectives (De Raad & Schouwenburg, 1996). Personality traits have got relations

with every domain of indiviual’s life.

Objective

Objective of the study is;

To find out that the Big five Inventory developed by John etal, 1991 can measure the personality

traits of an individual.

To find out that every individual has different personality type on the basis of traits.
 Chapter 2

Method Section

Problem

Assessment of big five personality traits in an individual

Research design

Student used quasi- experimental design for assessing the big five personality traits in

participant.

Population

Student has target population of 5th semester Psychology students of GPGCW . Student

approach them without randomization. Student select the sample from the targeted population for

the purpose of study.

Sample & Sampling technique

Student select sample size of 1 by using convenient sampling technique.

Variables

Study has five variables;

 Openness

 Conscietiousness
  Agreeableness

 Extroversion

 Neuroticism.

Operational Definition of Variables

Openness: It is characteristic that includes imagination and insight.

Conscientiousness: It is a trait that include high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control,

and goal-directed behaviors.

Extraversion: is a trait that is easily identifiable and widely recognisable as someone who gets

energised in the company of others.

Agreeableness: it is a trait that shows signs of trust, altruism, kindness and affection.

Neuroticism: is characterized by sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability.

Student utilize the Big Five Inventory developed by john etal, 1991 to measure the above traits

in the participant.

Demographic Variable

Gender: Female

Age: 20yrs

Marital status: Single

Working status: Student

Family system: Nuclear

Instrument

Student utilize Big Five Personality Inventory to measure or asses the personality trait or

dominating personality trait of the participant.

Big Five Inventory

The Big Five Inventory is one of the most famous instrument for the assessment of

personality traits. It was developed by John and Srivastava (1999). The Big Five Inventory (BFI)

is based upon the big five dimensions of personality which were given by Goldberg (1993). The

big five factors include extraversion vs introversion, openness vs closeness to experience,

agreeableness vs antagonism, neuroticism vs emotional stability and the cinsientiousness vs lack

of direction. The BFI consist of 44 items that measure the each trait of personality.

Procedure

Student approach the target population and select the sample for the study. Student build

the repo with the participant for the purpose of study and convince the participant to cooperate

with student. Student used BFI for the purpose of measuring the traits of participant by applying

the inventory on the participant. Participant filled the form and student interpret the form by

scoring and analyzing it and then student reached results.

Administration

The big five personality test having fifty items were administered collectively in Haripur

to represent sample. The ages of participant 17-25 years and education level is graduate.
Participant takes 3-8 min to complete. Data were collected in October 2022. The test of big five

personality was administered in psychology department and it complete to 3-8min.

Mam NIGHAT GUL was our instructor on the time of test applying.
 Chapter 3

Results

Table 1: Measurement of Big Five Personality Traits of Participant

Variables f p Level

Openness 32 64% High

Conscientiousness 34 75.5% High

Extraversion 27 67.5% Moderate

Agreeableness 35 77.7% High

Neuroticism 27 67.5% High

Note: “f” is denoting frequency and “p” is denoting Percentiles.

Table 1 shows that the participant has dominating personality trait of “Agreeableness” with

having high level of Conscientiousness, Openness and Neuroticism personality traits. According

to table participant has moderate level of Extraversion with raw score of 27 respectively.

Discussion

According to the Big Five Inventory the participant’s personality type is Agreeableness

having this trait dominant over other four traits with percentile of 77.7% and raw score of 35.

Participant has the other three traits Openness, Neuroticism and Conscientiousness also with

high level having percentile of 64%, 67.5% and 77.5% raw score 32, 27 and 34 respectively.
Participant has moderate level of Extraversion with percentile 67.5%, having raw score of 27

respectively.
 References

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10 Aspects of the Big Five,' Vol. 93, No. 5, 880-896

Aaker, J. L. 1997. Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research XXXIV: 347-

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Briggs, S. R. 1989. The optimal level of measurement of personality constructs. In Buss, D. M.,

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