A Meta-Analysis of the Reliability of Free and For-Pay Big Five Scales

The present study meta-analytically compared coefficient alpha reliabilities reported for free and for-pay Big Five scales. We collected 288 studies from five previous meta-analyses of Big Five traits and harvested 1,317 alphas from these studies. We found that free and for-pay scales measuring Big...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of psychology 2016-05, Vol.150 (4), p.422-430
Main Authors: Hamby, Tyler, Taylor, Wyn, Snowden, Audrey K., Peterson, Robert A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
assessment
Big Five
Cronbach's alpha
Five factor model
for-pay scales
free scales
Humans
Meta-analysis
Personality Assessment
Personality psychology
Personality traits
Psychometrics
Reliability
Reproducibility of Results
Systematic review
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The present study meta-analytically compared coefficient alpha reliabilities reported for free and for-pay Big Five scales. We collected 288 studies from five previous meta-analyses of Big Five traits and harvested 1,317 alphas from these studies. We found that free and for-pay scales measuring Big Five traits possessed comparable reliabilities. However, after we controlled for the numbers of items in the scales with the Spearman-Brown formula, we found that free scales possessed significantly higher alpha coefficients than for-pay scales for each of the Big Five traits. Thus, the study offers initial evidence that Big Five scales that are free more efficiently measure these traits for research purposes than do for-pay scales.
ISSN:0022-3980
1940-1019
DOI:10.1080/00223980.2015.1060186