NEO Personality Inventory – 4 (NEO-4)
This personality test was formulated by tweaking the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). While NEO-PI-R provides information on the five personality domains namely Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Neuroticism, the NEO-4 only offers information on four of these domains. The omitted domain is Neuroticism. The developers of the NEO-4 test have indicated that the test is suitable for use in employment and personal counseling settings that involve activities like career development, career counseling, and employee training. This is where these four domains mainly focus upon. The four domains used for the NEO-4 test will avail information regarding many aspects of the individual's personality. According to the developers of the test, it is possible to interpret the four domains at the global factor level. There are six personal styles that can be interpreted from the four domains. These styles are interactions, interests, attitudes, activity, learning, and character. The test being multifaceted, it offers an opportunity to describe the many positive characteristics together with the negative ones in a manner that is readily acceptable to the individual. The four domains covered by the test to cover a wide range of a person's personality. This makes the test best as compared to others. Using the test one can identify a person's traits and present the information that relates to the person's strengths and weaknesses.

The test developers have provided materials that assist in the provision of a respected, comprehensive, and well-established personality assessment for adolescents and adults. Some of the materials included are a reusable item booklet, a profile form, hand-scorable carbonless answer sheet, summary form for the client, and booklet containing the six personal style graphs. We will focus on the NEO-4 test and the paper will comprise of an annotated bibliography of seven articles that focus on technical qualities of the test.

Annotated Bibliography

Allik, J., Church, A. T., Ortiz, F. A., Rossier, J., H?ebí?ková, M., De Fruyt, F., . . . McCrae, R. R. (2017). Mean profiles of the NEO personality inventory. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(3), 402-420.

This article addresses the validity of the test. The authors aimed at uncovering if they would have the same results if they increased the sample size. The first sample size comprised of 36 countries and for this case, they increased it to 62 different countries (Allik et al., 2017). They were able to validate the initial research and they also confirmed to have received similar scores. The authors did confirm that the test author does receive royalties from the NEO inventories and this could have been a source of bias. We can see that their concurrent validity for this particular study. The authors have managed to use the NEO-4 test to predict the outcomes of their study. With the information that was currently available, even after increasing the number of participating countries, the authors had similar results as was the case with the initial study. The study had a total of 2,280 subscale T-scores representing 30 subscales by 76 samples, and out of these only 40 (1.75%) were smaller than 40 or they were larger than 60 (Allik et al., 2017). What this data means is that in about 98% of the cases that were investigated, the differences from the initial study that was conducted in 1992 norms were smaller than one standard deviation. The authors found that the standard deviation of the mean sample values was within the same range.

Dwan, T., Ownsworth, T., Donovan, C., & Lo, A. H. Y. (2017). Reliability of the NEO Five Factor Inventory short form for assessing personality after stroke. International Psychogeriatrics, 29(7), 1157-1168.

This article addresses the reliability of the test. The authors aimed at using the test to establish the reliability of personality inventories after a person suffers a stroke. When a person suffers a stroke, they are prone to behavioral, physical, and cognitive impairments, which do affect the individual's quality of life (Dwan, Ownsworth, Donovan, & Lo, 2017). It is for this reason that the authors wanted to establish if it is possible to use the NEO-4 test to assess personality changes after a stroke. The authors have noted that internal consistency for the test was poor for the agreeableness and openness scales. It has been indicated that the reason for this consistency could be due to the fact that the individual has suffered a stroke and the test was administered days while in the hospital or a couple of days after being discharged home. Internal consistency reliability was used by the authors for this particular study. This kind of reliability is used when a person wants to assess the consistency of test results across multiple items within a test. "Internal consistency for the GAI and CES-D in the current...…that was mapped. Content validity is a specific type of validity that was used for this study. This is because the authors wanted to estimate how a measure would represent every single element of the construct. The authors aimed at determining if it is possible to link the personality inventories and this was possible even if the test used for the study was different. This indicates that one can use a different test and still be able to link the results to another test. "Summed scores of the item pools were computed and examined for each personality dimension. The mean of the summed scores for the 214 Antagonism items was 41.51 (SD = 14.59) for the total sample, 43.31 (SD = 13.66) for the student sample, and 34.42 (SD = 15.97) for the nonstudent sample.

Takahashi, M., Shirayama, Y., Muneoka, K., Suzuki, M., Sato, K., & Hashimoto, K. (2013). Low openness on the revised NEO personality inventory as a risk factor for treatment-resistant depression. PLoS ONE, 8(9), e71964.

The authors of this article were addressing the validity of the NEO-4 test. Having already conducted a study for identifying risk factors for treatment-resistant depression, the authors wanted to determine if they would be able to find the same results using the NEO-4 test. This was possible and the authors even identified a new trait that they indicated should also be included as a risk factor for treatment-resistant depression. The discovered trait was low openness on the NEO scale. The article does not address sources of error variance, evidence of reliability, or reliability estimates. Construct validity was used for this article. The authors wanted to use the NEO test because previous studies have always shown positive results. Though no one had studied the impact of treatment-resistant depression, it was vital that for the authors to confirm their initial results and to determine if they would have similar results (Takahashi et al., 2013). The test does measure up to its claims as the authors discovered. Patients who have treatment-resistant depression did have significant high scores for neuroticism and low scores for openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness on the NEO. This is in comparison to the healthy controls that were used for this study. Even when compared to patients with remitted depression, the results still indicated that patients with treatment-resistant depression had similar results as indicated above. Therefore, it is clear that treatment-resistant depression…