NEO-FIVE FACTOR INVENTORY

NEO-Five Factor Inventory: Applications in Organizational Psychology

NEO-Five Factor Inventory

Introduction

The Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO PI-R, is a psychological personality inventory; a 240-item measure of the Five Factor Model: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Additionally, the test measures six subordinate dimensions (known as 'facets') of each of the "FFM" personality factors. The test was developed by Paul T. Costa, Jr. and Robert R. McCrae for use with adult (17+) men and women without overt psychopathology. The short version, the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), has 60 items (12 items per domain).

The original version of the measurement was the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Inventory (NEO-I). This version only measured three of the Big Five personality traits. It was later revised to include all five traits and renamed the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI). In this version, "NEO" was now considered part of the name of the test and was no longer an acronym. This naming convention continued with the third and latest version, the NEO PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 2009).

A mnemonic device for the five primary factors is the acronym "OCEAN," or alternatively "CANOE".

Test And Its History

Costa and McCrae were researching how personality changed with age. Personality inventories were included in the batteries of assessments participants took in the Normative Aging Study. Costa and McCrae report that in looking at the competing factorally analyzed trait personality theories of the day, they noticed much more agreement at the level of the higher-order factors than at the lower order factors. Costa and McCrae report that they began by looking for the broad and agreed-upon traits of Neuroticism (N) and Extraversion (E), but factor analysis also led them to a third broad trait, Openness to Experience (O). The first version of the NEO only included those three factors, and was included in the Augmented Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. (Costa and McCrae, 2009)

From this data, Costa and McCrae recognized two more factors: Agreeableness (A) and Conscientiousness (C). They then published the first manual for the NEO, which included all five factors. The assessment also included six “facet” sub-scales for the three original factors (N, E, & O). As research began to accumulate that the five factors were adequately broad to be useful, there were also calls for a more detailed view of personality. In Costa and McCrae published a Revised NEO manual which included six facets for each factor (30 in total).

In the most recent publication, there are two forms for the NEO, one for self report (form S) and one for observer rating (form R). Both forms consist of 240 items (descriptions of behavior) answered on a five point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Finally, there is a 60-item assessment of domains only called the “NEO FFI.” There are paper and computer versions of all forms available. (Costa and McCrae, 2009)

The manual reports that administration of the full version should take between 30 and 40 minutes. Costa and McCrae report that the assessment should not be evaluated if there are ...