Response sets measured with NEO-FFI

The NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) contains positively and negatively formulated items in each dimension. It is therefore possible to test the impact of the item orientation on reliability. The subject sample of the study comprised 1908 persons. The correlations among items which share the same orientation of the scale are greater than the correlations among items with different orientations. It was not possible to identify negative items using Rasch scaling. The Mixed-Rasch-model yielded two types of subjects which show differences in the use of extreme of judgments but not in the handling of negative items. For each of the five scales scores for acquisition and for response variability were calculated. All correlations among these scores were positive (variability: between 36 and 51 acquisition: between 20 and 41), which indicates the generalizability of these response characteristics.