The eBullpen Personality Model

Introduction

The personality “engine” used behind the scenes at eBullpen is a scientifically developed version of the popular “Big Five” personality model, which proposes that normal personality traits, which everybody possesses, fall into five broad dimensions. This document describes the personality model and details the survey used by eBullpen to measure personality.

What is personality?

www.dictionary.com describes personality as “The totality of qualities and traits, as of character or behavior that are peculiar to a specific person”. Peculiar is a dictionary word, and we could perhaps say that personality is a person’s tendencies to behave in various ways when interacting with people and circumstances. Whatever the right definition, people have attempted to analyze other peoples’ personalities, and so define them, since history began.

The Big Five Model

Historical and Technical:

Historically, the primary research approach into personality, as a construct, involved the so-called “Lexical hypothesis” which suggested that important aspects of human characteristics would find expression in any natural language. Thus, an analysis of a language’s descriptive words could detect underlying characteristics, and early psychologists actually created lists of descriptive words from dictionaries. Starting around 1950, Raymond Cattell may have been the first researcher to find support for the five-factor model when he conducted a series of studies that involved research participants rating each other on long lists of descriptive words. Cattell stripped out words that reflected non-personality constructs such as cognitive abilities, values, and emotions. He then employed a series of analytical techniques to determine the latent variables that explained the ratings. Later, he pioneered the use of the quantitative/statistical technique called “factor analysis”.

For the non-technical a useful translation might be: If people are a certain way, there are words out there to describe them. Collect the words and find the ones that work best by testing them out.

Lewis R. Goldberg reviewed decades of research, including Cattell’s, and found that researchers consistently discovered five broad dimensions of personality (though sometimes they thought they had found fewer or more dimensions). His articles have cemented the idea of five groupings of personality traits. Certainly, the Big Five enjoys a lot of popular support, and Five-factor models have appeared in empirical personality survey research for decades.


The Big Five Model proposes that normal personality traits can be grouped into five broad dimensions, each of which has several narrower ‘facets’.

The five broad dimensions are:

• Sociability: this describes how energetic and enthusiastic you are, particularly when interacting with others.
• Agreeableness (which eBullpen calls “Interpersonal Style”): this describes your attitudes toward, and interest in, others.
• Openness (which eBullpen calls “Curiosity”): this describes how open you are to new experiences and new ways of doing things.
• Caution (which eBullpen calls “Adaptability”): this describes how organized and thorough you are in life, and in pursuing goals.
• Stability (which eBullpen calls “Temperament”): Describes how you naturally react to pressures and stress.

Each dimension is described below. Each dimension is bipolar in that it represents a continuum of behaviors from one “extreme” to an opposite. For example, the factor called Sociability is actually a continuum from Introversion to Extraversion.

It is fundamental to the concept of personality that neither end of any such continuum is better or worse than the other end. It is just different.

For each dimension, the line between the “extremes”, the continuum, is enumerated (has a progression of numbers on it - in eBullpen’s case, 1-100) and the names of the facets are listed in the middle. The facets can be described as what the scale is measuring, and the words on either end describe the person who tends towards that end of the particular facet. So a person who tends towards introversion in the facet of friendliness could be described as “shy”. The scale (the progression of numbers) is to be able to provide a suitable adverb to the adjective, shy, so “very” shy, or “fairly” shy.

Introverted * Shy * Quiet * Private * Reserved

Facets: Friendliness Gregariousness Activity level Excitement seeking

Extraverted * Out-going * Talkative * Sociable * Energetic

Independent * Guarded * Disagreeable * Competitive * Tough minded

Facets: Trust Cooperation Modesty Sympathy

Agreeable * Tolerant * Adaptable * Good natured * Tender minded

Caution (Adaptability)

Spontaneous * Easy going * Spontaneous * Adaptable * Hedonistic

Facets: Orderliness Dutifulness Self discipline Cautiousness

Methodical * Disciplined * Methodical * Organized * Thorough

Stability (Temperament)

Emotional * Apprehensive * Anxious * High strung * Tense

Facets: Anxiety Anger Self consciousness Vulnerability

Calm * Confident * Rational * Unflappable * Composed

Openness (Curiosity)

Traditional * Narrow interests * Concrete * Conventional * Practical

Facets: Imagination Adventurousness Audacity

Open-minded * Broad interests * Abstract * Unconventional * Impractical

The eBullpen Big Five Survey

The personality survey, developed for eBullpen by Alan Mead, PhD., is designed to measure the five main dimensions of the Big Five. Items were chosen which reflect the underlying facets, but, in order to keep the survey brief for the benefit of users, only the broad dimensions of personality are computed.

The eBullpen survey yields a raw score for each of the five dimensions. Each raw score is scaled (some mathematical formulae are applied) in order to produce the same output range for each dimension, from 1 to 100. A score of 1 is at the extreme “left end” of the dimension, while a score of 100 is the extreme “right end” of the scale. So, a Sociability score of 1 would indicate extreme introversion while a score of 100 would indicate extreme extraversion. The eBullpen system outputs a feedback report for the survey-taker, which has a five position scale. For Sociability, the output would be one of: “Very Introverted”, “Fairly Introverted”, “Both Introverted and Extraverted”, “Fairly Extraverted”, and “Very Extraverted”.

As part of the research conducted to bring eBullpen to public and commercial use, for bringing Employers and Job Seekers together, a validation of our survey questions was conducted by Dr. Mead. The purpose of the study was to verify that our survey questions correctly identify trait and degree of the trait, and to test out different wordings to find those best suited for the survey.

(As a "Thank you" to the kind people who took part in our validation study, eBullpen LLC made charitable donations to Tsunami relief, via the United States Fund for UNICEF www.unicefusa.org; Diabetes Research, via the American Diabetes Association www.diabetes.org; St Isodore's School in Carol Stream, IL; and St Norbert's Church, Northbrook IL.)

As a result of this study, we have empirical evidence from a substantial sample of volunteers that supports the validity of the Employer and Job Seeker survey results. With our system, an Employer can define the kind of person he would like to employ. The eBullpen system searches for people who fit that profile from the available pool of Job Seekers, and delivers the search results in order of percentage personality and demographic match to the desired profile.

As in all research, there are no absolutes. We believe our system to be accurate, and effective. We will continue to measure and test our accuracy, using statistical information generated by eBullpen’s web site, and where improvements are desirable for better results, we will make them.



eBullpen, 29 April, 2005