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Age-neutrality of the NEO-PI-R: Potential Differential Item Functioning in Older Versus Younger Adults

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Abstract

Geriatric researchers and clinicians often have to deal with a lack of valid personality measures for older age groups (e.g., Mroczek, Hurt, & Berman, 1999; Zweig 2008), which hampers a reliable assessment of personality in later life. An age-neutral measurement system is one of the basic conditions for an accurate personality assessment across the lifespan, both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. In the present study, we empirically investigate the age-neutrality of one of the most widely used personality measures (i.e., the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992)), by examining potential Differential Item Functioning (DIF). Overall, results indicate that the vast majority (92.9 % at domain-level and 95 % at facet-level) of the NEO PI-R items was similarly endorsed by younger and older age groups with the same position on the personality trait of interest, corroborating the NEO PI-R’s age neutrality. However, Differential Test Functioning (DTF) analyses revealed large DTF for Extraversion, and facet A6 (Tender-Mindedness). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for using the current format of the NEO PI-R in older aged samples.

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Notes

  1. DIF analyses are well suited to detect how systematically biased an item is for one group versus an other group, controlling for true group-mean differences (Balsis et al. 2007, p. 172).

  2. Our rationale for this was the following: in deriving their thresholds Penfield and Algina (2006) argued that a collective large level of DIF in a group of items exist if 25 % or more of the items are categorized as having moderate or large magnitudes of DIF based on the ETS classification scheme (i.e. if 25 % or more of the items have an absolute value of log(αMH) greater than or equal to 0.43. They also suggest that MH and LA-Lor have similar meanings in terms of DIF magnitude. Because we wanted to reduce the Type I error, a Bonferroni correction was applied and an adjusted LA-Lor cut-off value of 1.08 (instead of 0.64) was used to flag items with large DIF. In line, we made a similar adjustment for the DTF thresholds. For example: Penfield and Algina consider the variance of DIF effect large when weighted v² > 0.14, using an LA-Lor value of 0.43 as critical value. Since we adhere to a stringent LA-Lor critical value (>1.08) we adjusted this to v² > 0.35 (i.e. 0.14/0.43*1.08).

  3. A similar reasoning was handled at facet-level. Here we used a stringent LA-Lor critical value of 0.92, leading to an adjusted v² ≥ 0.30 for large DTF (i.e. 0.14/0.43*0.92).

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Acknowledgment

The authors thank Prof. Dr. R. Penfield for his assistance and support with the DIFAS program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical and Lifespan Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Joke Van den Broeck, Gina Rossi & Eva Dierckx

  2. Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Barbara De Clercq

Authors
  1. Joke Van den Broeck
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  2. Gina Rossi
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  3. Eva Dierckx
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  4. Barbara De Clercq
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Correspondence to Joke Van den Broeck.

Additional information

This research is part of the first author’s doctoral dissertation, and preliminary results were partly presented at the 15th European Conference on Personality in July, 2010.

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Van den Broeck, J., Rossi, G., Dierckx, E. et al. Age-neutrality of the NEO-PI-R: Potential Differential Item Functioning in Older Versus Younger Adults. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 34, 361–369 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-012-9287-4

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