Personality Traits in HILDA

Wave 5 was the first time in HILDA that respondents were questioned on their personality character traits. The inclusion of personality in HILDA was based on the Five Factor (Big-Five) Personality Inventory, which is a descriptive model of personality identifying five broad dimensions including Emotional stability, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. This paper will item analyse responses to the 36 personality questions used in Wave 5 to evaluate how well they capture the separate constructs of the Five Factor Personality Inventory, and to assess the reliabilities of each of the scales. In addition, this paper will examine how the HILDA personality scales correlate with other measures available in HILDA, known to be associated with personality. Using a maximum likelihood factor analysis, the items grouped into seven factors, five of which support the Big-Five structure. Subsequent analysis for a five factor solution suggested that the majority of items performed appropriately. The resulting five scales show an adequate degree of internal consistency, good variance and discriminating properties, and normal distributions. The association of the five scales with other measures known to be associated with personality were found, with few exceptions, to be consistent with the literature. The conceptual status of the Big-Five has limited the extent to which certain psychometric properties, such as construct and content validity, can be examined. With this in consideration, we interpret our results as offering an adequate, but not complete, support for the HILDA personality traits inventory and subsequent scales. I strongly recommend the use of the original TDA-40 items, as opposed to the current 36 items, in future waves of HILDA.