Age, education, and the internal consistency of personality scales.

Investigated whether the internal consistencies of personality scales increase with age and education and, if so, what causes these increases. Between 96 and 106 respondents in each of the age groups 13–24 yrs, 15–26 yrs, 17–28 yrs, and 19–20 yrs and 198 adults (aged 21–25 yrs) with varying amounts of formal education completed the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, the California F-Scale, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, a dogmatism scale, the Extraversion subscale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory, a self-monitoring scale, and a private self-conscious scale. Results show that age and education were both linearly related to the internal consistency with which Ss responded to all 8 personality scales. The relations were stronger for education than for age, the correlations between individuals' consistency scores across scales revealed a strong consistency response set. Stepwise regression showed that this internal consistency was related to age, education, the failure to understand items, and private self-consciousness. These last 2 contributions suggest that lower consistencies are partly a measurement problem and partly due to real lower personality consistencies on trait constructs. It is suggested that, because most personality research has used nonadults, the lower internal consistency of the younger Ss has contributed to the limited predictive power of personality scales. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)