1. Person-Centered Methods for Personality Profiling
Megan E. Baker & James W. Grice
Oklahoma State University
ABSTRACT
OBSERVATION ORIENTED MODELING
OBSERVATION ORIENTED MODELING
The present study used a new method of personality profiling that is person-centered rather than mean-centered. Observation Oriented Modeling (Grice, 2011) was used on Iwasaki’s Master Thesis (1998) archival data, and differences in the Big Five personality profiles of Asian Americans (AA), European Americans (EU), and Asian Internationals (AI) were found. Specifically, using the OOM software, a simple ordinal pattern for differentiating between the groups was discovered. A large majority of EA participants (78.67%) reported higher levels of Extraversion compared to Openness (E > O), while majorities of AA (67.86%) and AI (61.11%) participants demonstrated the opposite pattern (E<O). Overall, 69.21% of all participants were correctly classified based solely on these ordinal patterns. The results indicate that through Observation Oriented Modeling, one can build a simple personality profile that is able to accurately differentiate between ethnic groups.
Results
Results of the ordinal analysis showed that 78.67% of the European American (EA) students demonstrated the E > O pattern, whereas 67% of Asian Americans (AI) and 61.11% of Asian Internationals demonstrated the opposite (E < O) pattern. Overall, 69.21% of the students in Iwasaki’s study could be accurately classified into their perspective ethnic groups based on the relative magnitude of their E and O scores (E > O or E < O). Furthermore, in SPSS a mean- and variance-based complex discriminant function analysis yielded a slightly lower overall accuracy in classification (67%), when all five traits were included in the analysis.
Methods
Using the Observation Oriented Modeling (OOM) software, we examined ordinal patterns of Big Five scores for individuals in each of the three ethnic groups. The median ordinal differences between the Big Five traits for the three groups are as follows: 1
REPLICATION
Using data from an open-source personality research project ( we attempted to replicate these findings. Individuals completed the IPIP measure of the Big Five traits and indicated their race as Caucasian-European (n = 10,537) or as Asian/Pacific Islander (n = 1,926). Results indicated that a large majority (81.16%) of the Caucasian-European individuals reported higher levels of Openness relative to Extraversion (O > E), exactly opposite of the pattern in Iwasaki’s data set. Consistent with Iwasaki’s data set, however, a majority (79.39%) of the Asian/Pacific Islander participants also reported relatively high Openness trait scores when compared to Extraversion (O > E). In brief, the two ethnic groups could not be differentiated based on their E and O score differences.
Fig. 2
OOM determines for each individual whether or not his or her Big Five scores fit the ordinal pattern. The following figure shows an individual who fits (person #4) and an individual who does not fit (person #36) the median ordinal pattern:
ARCHIVAL DATA
In Iwasaki’s master thesis, she described the personality trait profiles of 203 Southern Illinois University Asian American (AA), Asian International (AI), and European American (EA) students. Within this study, the participants took the NEO PI-r personality assessment and were given scores based on the Big Five Personality Traits. The scores ranged from 0 to 192 for the Big Five Personality traits: Openness (O), Conscientiousness (C), Extraversion (E), Agreeableness (A), and Neuroticism (N). The results of her study indicated that AAs and AIs had relatively lower mean Extraversion and Agreeableness scores compared to Openness. For EAs, the opposite pattern of mean trait scores was found (see Figure 1).
Fig.3
The number of people whose Big Five scores fit the respective ordinal pattern is simply tallied by the OOM software and reported as a Percent Correct Classification (PCC) index.
Based on Iwasaki’s data (Figure 1), it was theorized that the traits of E, O, and A, all were key differentiating factors, as shown in the following ordinal patterns:
DISCUSSION
While the person-centered profiling results from Iwasaki’s study were interesting, they were based on a relatively small sample (n=203) of persons from a specific location (Illinois). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the ordinal patterns differentiating between people of European and Asian descent did not replicate when tested in a larger sample. However, it should be noted that the online sample included non-Americans as well as Americans. More importantly, the online study employed the IPIP measure of the Big Five traits whereas Iwasaki used the NEO PI-r. Important differences between these two questionnaires may exist even though they purport to measure the same traits.
Given these differences, more work is clearly needed, but the results from Iwasaki’s study suggest that it may be possible to create simple personality profiles that differentiate between different ethnic groups. Using non-parametric, person-centered methods like OOM may ultimately prove useful. Future studies in the realm of personality profiling should consider this new method of individual-based personality profiling. It is extremely simple, and could even reveal more accurate personality profiles, since it is based on individual scores rather than the means, variances, and covariances found in traditional statistical analyses.
Fig.4
Indeed, analyses showed that including the traits of Neuroticism (N) and Conscientiousness (C) led to lower PCC indices. Surprisingly, the inclusion of Agreeableness (A) was also not necessary to maximally differentiate among the groups. The final ordinal pattern for the three ethnicity groups are therefore shown below; whereas EA’s predicted ordinal pattern indicates E > O, the AI and AA groups indicates the opposite pattern (E < O):
Figure 1. Mean Big Five scores for three ethnic groups.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Please send inquiries to James Grice Personality Laboratory:
Fig.5