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Over the years, a number of personality inventories have been developed to measure the components of the Big Five factor model, such as the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) (Gow et al. 2005), the Big Five Inventory (BFI) (John and Srivastava 2001) and the Revised NEO personality inventory (NEO-PI-R) (Costa and McCrae 1992b; for more Big Five inventories see John and Srivastava 2001)). Of all the personality measures, the NEO-PI-R, and its shortened version the NEO-FFI, are the most widely used and validated (Rolland et al. 1998; Aluja et al. 2005; Gow et al. 2005).

The NEO-PI-R was first published in 1985 by Costa and McCrae with the aim of building a truly multi-purpose personality inventory or, in their own words, “a single instrument useful for understanding and predicting a wide variety of criteria such as vocational interests, health and illness behavior, psychological well-being, and characteristic coping styles” (Costa and McCrae 1992b, p.39). The self-administered version of this questionnaire consists of 240 items, each of which is a statement such as “I always feel blue,” “I easily get angry,” or “I usually feel

a burst of energy inside me.” Answers to these 240 statements must be given according to the

five-point Likert scale (i.e. very much disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and very much agree). Some statements were negatively posed in order to detect respondents’ consistency. From the 240 items, every eight items elicit a facet. The score of six facets constituting a domain can then be summed to produce the domain score. So, the NEO-PI-R provides information on both facet and domain levels.

With its 240 question items, the NEO-PI-R is rather lengthy for many empirical studies. It takes on average 45 minutes to one hour to complete the whole questionnaire (Costa and McCrae 1992b). In response to this problem, Costa and McCrae introduced a shorter version of the questionnaire, the Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) with 60 items, in 1992 (Costa and McCrae 1992b). The 60 items contained in the NEO-FFI were taken from the original 240 items. Out of the 48 items eliciting each domain in the NEO-PI-R, twelve items that have the highest factor loadings on the corresponding domain, and, thereby, contribute most to its overall meaning, were chosen for the new tool. One obvious benefit of this condensing of the measure is that the NEO-FFI can be used in a study where the time available for testing is limited. However, the cost for reducing the items to only one-fourth is that information on specific facets within each domain is no longer available. Therefore, the inventory is only recommended when global information on personality is considered sufficient (Costa and McCrae 1992b). Despite being condensed, the NEO-FFI has been found to have a high correlation with the NEO-PI-R. Costa and McCrae (1992b) found very satisfactory correlation coefficients when comparing the

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NEO-FFI and NEO-PI-R (these being 0.92, 0.90, 0.91, 0.77 and 0.87 for scales measuring neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness respectively). It was also found that each group of 12 items selected to assess each personality factor had a satisfactory level of internal consistency, as measured by Cronbach’s Alpha reliability index.23 _{The Cronbach’s Alpha of each personality factor was reported to be between} 0.60 and 0.80 (Rolland et al. 1998; Panayiotou et al. 2004; Aluja et al. 2005).

An important question is: are both the NEO-PI-R and NEO-FFI applicable in non- English-speaking countries? The two tools are devised to assess the BFM, the framework of which was developed based on words found in English dictionaries and using Western personality theories. As a consequence, if the five personality domains were not present in the non-English speaking countries, datasets obtained from the NEO-PI-R and NEO-FFI would actually be meaningless.

An approach to this question is to directly test the Big Five measurement tools that have been developed in the English speaking world on people in the country of interest. This approach focuses on the cross-cultural validity of the BFM measurement tools (Cheung et al. 2011). In studies using this approach, the NEO-PI-R and the NEO-FFI is translated into various languages, then factor analysis is performed to analyze the latent personality structure of the datasets and to examine whether it coincides with the BFM. In general, findings from these studies suggest that factors similar to the Big Five emerge across western and non-English speaking countries, including Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Estonia, Finland and France. In addition, Zheng, et al. (2008), as well as McCrae et al. (2004), and Trull and Geary (1997), provided convincing empirical evidence that the NEO questionnaires can be employed in non-western societies, including China, Russia and the Czech Republic. The same holds true for countries speaking eastern languages such as Indian, Filipino and Vietnamese (McCrae et al. 1998; Leininger 2002; Lodhi et al. 2002). In 2005, McCrae and Terraciano (2005) attempted to validate the NEO-PI-R once and for all. They gathered data from 50 cultures representing six continents, including African and Arabic countries which had not been exhaustively investigated. The NEO-PI-R was employed in non- English speaking countries such as Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong. After the data from each

23 _{Cronbach’s alpha is a scale indicating the degree to which a set of items measures a single latent construct}

(Shevlin et al. 2000). It is assumed that if a set of questions is eliciting the same underlying construct, they must have a high level of inter-correlation. Cronbach's alpha will generally increase as the inter-correlations among test items increase. The reliability scale ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 meaning that all questions elicit the same underlying psychological construct. The score 0 means that there is no correlation among different questions and that each question in the group assesses totally different psychological constructs.

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country were pooled and standardized, the whole dataset was factor analyzed. The results “unmistakably” suggest a five-factor solution is applicable (McCrae and Terracciano 2005, p. 552).

Another approach to test the validity of the BFM in non-English speaking countries aims at exploring the indigenous personality characteristics of the people in such countries. In studies adopting this approach, indigenous personality terms are carefully collected from the native language. The investigators then use factor analysis to find whether or not the Big Five personality structure emerges from the trait terms people use in their daily lives in a particular country. A very good summary of cross-cultural studies conducted early on is given in Saucier et al. (2000), in which the authors review a total of 19 cross-cultural studies conducted in: Germanic (German, Dutch), Slavic (Polish, Czech, Russian), Romance (Italian, Spanish), and non-Indo-European languages (Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, Korean, Filipino). In all 19 studies, trait terms were gathered from the dictionaries of each local language and factor - analyzed in an attempt to find the Big Five personality dimensions. Saucier et al. (2000) reported that personality factors resembling those of the Big Five emerged from the Germanic languages. Slavic studies can also be considered as supportive of the BFM. However, the replication of the Big Five factors was somewhat less consistent in studies using the Romance languages (Italian and Spanish). Saucier et al. (2000) demonstrated that sub-components of emotional stability (neuroticism) were spread across several factors, and that the intellect factor (openness to experience) was not clearly recovered. For this reason, Saucier et al. called for more studies to be carried out with the romance languages. Studies using the non-Indo- European languages exhibited some minor deviations from the Big Five structure; nevertheless, Saucier et al. considered them to satisfactorily support the BFM. All in all, the authors concluded that the pattern of results tended to support the idea that approximately five basic trait clusters can be detected across different languages.

In summary, it has been shown here that the BFM has satisfactorily demonstrated its validity in both English and non-English speaking countries, supporting the basic premise that the BFM is a comprehensive and universal personality framework, one that represents the basic psychological aspects of individuals, regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political backgrounds. As a result, it can be safely assumed that the NEO-PI-R and NEO-FFI can be employed in non-English speaking countries, producing personality data that are theoretically meaningful.

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3.3 Summary

The goal of this chapter was to introduce the models and methods used in personality psychology to provide a better level of understanding and assessment of the mental attributes of CVM respondents. The review conducted with respect to the definition of the personality construct suggests that personality is a concept devised to take account of the sum total of a person’s mental characteristics. However, due to the fundamentally broad nature of personality, attempts to pin down its elements during the 1930s to 1950s met with limited success. The theories of personality developed during that period shed light on parts of personality, but not the whole. It became clear that the phenomena embedded in the concept of personality are both complex and diverse, and that it would be impossible to unite all of these aspects in a single theoretical framework. Thus, during the 1950s to 1970s, personality theorists turned elementaristic, focusing their attention on conceptualizing and measuring basic units of personality, and this led to the dominance of trait theory. The main advantage of trait theory is that it operationalizes the concept of personality using trait dispositions, all of which can be conveniently measured using self-reporting mechanisms. Also, the premise was that knowledge about parts of the personality would enable theorists to form a theory about the whole. The chapter further showed that traits have a profound relevance when it comes to CVM decision- making, as they can be measured during a CVM survey using self-reporting inventories. Evidence also suggests that traits have an objective reality and can predict people’s behavior in the real world. The use of traits in this study would therefore seem justified.

Section 3.2 looked closely at the BFM, the long-awaited, comprehensive theory of personality. After the explosion of trait research, which resulted in a bonanza of trait terms, trait theorists had enough resources and reasons to develop a comprehensive theory about personality. The BFM emerged out of two lines of inquiry; one associated with the distillation of trait terms in the English dictionary and another with the exploration of traits developed in traditional personality theories. Special attention was given to the BFM framework put forward by Costa and McCrae, who extensively investigated the reliability and validity of the BFM during the 1980s and early 1990s, and, therefore, increased the popularity of their framework. This section went into detail regarding Costa and McCrae’s conceptions of the five personality domains and the 30 corresponding facets. It became apparent that the BFM provides a large number of powerful dispositions which can be used to explain many of the behavioral tendencies of individuals. So, it is very likely that by identifying respondents’ personalities in terms of domains and facets we will be able to detect systematic patterns in their WTP answers.

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The last part of Section 3.2 introduced the NEO-PI-R and NEO-FFI, both of which were developed by Costa and McCrae, but have since been verified by psychologists worldwide. The section came to the conclusion that both the model and the measurement tools used for the BFM could be employed in this study without reservation.

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Chapter 4 Personality and contingent