In addition, the NEO PI-R also reports on six subcategories of each Big Five personality trait (called facets).
Historically, development of the Revised NEO PI-R began in 1978 when Paul Costa and Robert McCrae published a personality inventory.
The revised inventories feature updated vocabulary that could be understood by adults of any education level, as well as children.
The inventories have both longer and shorter versions, with the full NEO PI-R consisting of 240 items and providing detailed facet scores.
A table of the personality dimensions measured by the NEO PI-R, including facets, is as follows: Kindness[5] Imagination[5]/ Self-efficacy[5]/ Anger[5]/ Artistic Interest[5]/ Morality[5]/ Organizing[5] Emotionality[5] Sense of Duty/Obligation[5] Lively Temperament[6] Adventurousness[5]/Exploration[6] Cooperation[5] Immoderation[5] Intellectual Interest[5]/Curiosity[6] Willpower[5] Fear[5]/Learned helplessness[5] Cheerfulness[5]/Vivacity[6] Psychological liberalism[5]/Tolerance to ambiguity[5] Sympathy[5] Cautiousness[5] In the most recent publication, there are two forms for the NEO, self-report (form S) and observer-report (form R) versions.
Costa and McCrae pointed out that these findings not only demonstrate good reliability of the domain scores, but also their stability (among individuals over the age of 30).
[3] The psychometric properties of NEO PI-R scales have been found to generalize across ages, cultures, and methods of measurement.
[13] Although individual differences (rank-order) tend to be relatively stable in adulthood, there are maturational changes in personality that are common to most people (mean-level changes).
[15] Costa and McCrae reported in the NEO manual research findings regarding the convergent and discriminant validity of the inventory.
For example, Conard (2005) found that Conscientiousness significantly predicted the GPA of college students, over and above using SAT scores alone.
[16] In a study conducted in Seville, Spain, Cano-Garcia and his colleagues (2005) found that, using a Spanish version of the inventory, dimensions of the NEO correlated with teacher burnout.
These languages are Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Marathi, Persian, Peruvian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Sotho, Spanish, Taiwanese, Thai, Tigrignan, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Xhosa.
Critical reviews of the NEO PI-R were published in the 12th edition of the Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY).
The NEO-Pi-R (which only measures 57% of the known trait variance in the normal personality sphere alone) has been severely criticized both in terms of its factor analytic/construct validity and its psychometric properties.
Ben-Porath and Waller pointed out that the NEO Inventories could be improved with the addition of controls for dishonesty and social desirability.
Juni argued that the existence of the FFM was phenomenological and atheoretical, the model gaining popularity as a result of the influence of the authors (McCrae and Costa) in the psychological community.
Research from China,[32][33] Estonia, Finland,[34] the Philippines, France,[35] German-speaking countries,[36] India,[37] Portugal,[38] Russia,[39] South Korea,[40] Turkey,[41] Vietnam,[42] and Zimbabwe[43] have shown the FFM to be robust across cultures.
Rolland, on the basis of the data from a number of countries, asserted that the neuroticism, openness, and conscientiousness dimensions are cross-culturally valid.
Age differences in the five-factors of personality across the adult life span are parallel in samples from Germany, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, and South Korea.
[50] In a study published in Science, Lesch et al. (1996) found a relationship between the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region (5-HTTLPR) and the neuroticism subscale.