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The Versatility of the NEO Inventories: Applying Personality Insights to a Variety of Settings
Personality affects virtually every aspect of a person’s identity, including how they interact with others, their reactions to certain situations, and even what career paths may be best for them. According to the American Psychological Association, personality is defined as the enduring characteristics and behaviors that make up an individual’s unique adjustment to life. This includes their main traits, drives, interests, abilities, and emotional patterns, as well as their self-concept.
Comprising a variety of traits—both inherent and acquired—that are most clearly expressed during interactions with others, personality can be broken down into five domains:
- Neuroticism (N)
- Extraversion (E)
- Openness to experience (O)
- Agreeableness (A)
- Consciousness (C)
Each domain is defined by a variety of traits. Understanding the facets that a person displays and the dimensions that they are linked to is important for us to understand the individual’s personality as a whole. How we measure personality, though, depends on the tool being used.
The NEO Inventories 3 Normative Update from PAR are concise measures of the five major domains of personality and of the most important traits that define each domain. Together, the five broad domain scales and the 30 specific facet scales allow a comprehensive assessment of adolescent and adult personality, providing a clear summary that can be applied in a broad range of settings.
In this article, we will discuss what the NEO Inventories are, how they can be used, and what makes them so valuable in terms of their versatility.
How Do We Measure Personality?
Psychometric assessments like the NEO Inventories are considered the most reliable measures of personality for their ability to turn subjective answers into concrete, measurable traits. These question-based models ask respondents to answer specific items by ranking responses on a scale. These ranked responses deliver insights into the test-taker’s levels of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
The potential for how these insights can be used is virtually limitless, depending on how they are applied. For example, knowing that a candidate for an executive position ranks highly in conscientiousness can help determine if they will be a good leader. Similarly, knowing that a recruit to a football team scores low on agreeableness may indicate that this player could cause issues with the team’s dynamic or public image. Even understanding your own personality on a deeper level can help you in terms of a career search, academic endeavor, or with general self-development. Overall, the value of reliable personality measures cannot be overstated, regardless of their application.
How the NEO Inventories Provide Clear Personality Insights
The NEO Inventories stands out from other personality assessments because of their longevity, accessibility, and flexibility. With over 30 years of valid and reliable use, the NEO Inventories are renowned for being exceptionally thorough, valid, and versatile. They can be applied to a vast range of settings, including clinical, counseling, career counseling, human resources/employment, sports psychology, and psychotherapy. There are longer and shorter versions of the assessments available, as well as versions suited specifically to the needs of HR and career professionals.
Applications in which the NEO Inventories can be used include:
- Assessing potential personality disorders
- Psychiatric and psychological assessment
- Understanding a new client as a baseline at the start of therapy
- Determining the optimal form of therapy/assessing the probable response to therapy
- Obtaining information on a patient’s prognosis
- Evaluating key traits for sports team chemistry
- Understanding a potential employee’s strengths and weaknesses
- Establishing information about a client for executive coaching
By providing a clear and expansive view of a person’s personality, the NEO Inventories make it easier to understand how certain traits can affect the way that person will act or react in certain situations. This supports clinicians and professionals in their work by improving outcomes for the individuals they serve.
In addition, the NEO Inventories have now been updated to provide a new normative sample representative of the current U.S. population, fewer components for easier purchasing, online administration and scoring options, and more.