The Big Five personality test

Personality test has evolved on the basis of the early thoughts and thinking of Freud. For long Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been the undisputed leader in the personality test field. Big Five has taken up the competition with the MBTI about being the most popular/progressive personality test.

Big Five is also know as the Five Factor Model (FFM) or the OCEAN.

Big Five Personality traits

The Big Five personality traits is summarized below:

•    Openness - open-minded, an interest in art, emotional, adventurous, new ideas and curiosity.

•    Conscientiousness - typically self-disciplined, result oriented and structured, tradition and dutiful.

•    Extraversion - high energy level, people person, extrovert and gets stimulated by being around others.
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•    Agreeableness - compassionate, cooperative, ability to forgive and being pragmatic, lets get the thing done.

•    Neuroticism - sensible, vulnerable, in extreme: emotional unstable and neurotic.

The big five model tests help you identify your personality traits and explore your strengths. You must be honest while answering the questions because feedback is given only with your answers.

Feedback based on big five model is generally given in percentile scores signifying the presence of each of the factor in your whole personality.

Big Five Personality score

Studies suggest that that the distributed average score of people on the Big Five traits is as the following:

•    Openness: 57%
•    Extraversion: 54%
•    Conscientiousness: 49%
•    Neuroticism: 48%
•    Agreeableness: 42%

Big Five Development & History

Big Five has many fathers - among others: Sir Francis Galton, Gordon Allport, H. S. Odbert, Raymond Cattell, Ernest Tupes, Raymond Christal, Walter Mischel, Lewis Goldberg.

The Big Five personality test was originally developed back in the 1970’s by two independent personality research teams - headed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae (at the National Institutes of Health), and Warren Norman (at the University of Michigan)/Lewis Goldberg (at the University of Oregon).

The two teams had slightly different approaches to the study of personlity traits but ended up at the same results: most personality traits can be reduced to five dimensions.

The five dimensions of personality were etablised based upon  asking thousands of people hundreds of questions and analyzing the answers with a statistical method known as factor analysis. The five dimensions emerged from their analyses of the personality data.
Big Five refers to five broad personality traits that were developed through Lexical analysis. Psychologists have the last century analyzed several thousands of people asking them hundreds of questions. The results led to the formation of five general personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN) but in popular terms the Big Five.

Critique of the Big Five

Critics argue that there are limitations to the construct of the Big Five as an explanatory or predictive tool. It is argued that the Big Five does not explain all of human personality.

Another frequent criticism is that the Big Five is not theory-driven. It is merely a data-driven investigation of certain descriptors that tend to cluster together under factor analysis.

The big five model is itself interrelated. The five factors are not independent. Positive and negative correlations exist between the factors that form the model. There are people who say that the model does not suffice for further analysis of persons according to psychology. However, the big five model does give you a good overall introduction about your personality.
Despite the critiques the Big Five remains on of the very popular personality tests.

More about the Big- Five

Where can i try free personality tests?
The LeaderLab teamis developing a Big Five Inspired Job-profile test. They have developed 16 types like in the MBTI but it works morew intuitive and is build on the basis of the Work of Adizes four basis job-profiles. It’s a 12 minutes test with a relative high validity and very intuitive profiles, high quality personal feedback and 360 feedback possibility from friends and collegues. Big Five inspired  Personality Test

Personlity test and personal and career development:

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For a fuller account of the background and history to the Big Five (Big 5) personality test check out: http://www.centacs.com/quickstart.htm

http://www.personalitylab.org/: This site has a number of Big Five-based studies from Dr. Oliver John’s group at UC Berkeley.

http://www.personalityresearch.org/: This provides an accessible overview of the academic field of personality.

http://www.rap.ucr.edu/: Home page of lab of very well respected researcher - will give you an idea what it is personality researchers do!

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/perscontents.html: An online textbook that will give the reader a basic background on personality psychology.

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/: One of this site’s researcher’s homepage, which contains more information and results from studies using data from this site