Domains and Facets: Hierarchical
Personality Assessment Using the
Revised NEO Personality Inventory
Gerontology Research Center
National Institute on Aging, NIH
Baltimore, MD
The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992c) is a 240-item questionnaire designed to operationalize the five-factor model of personality (FFM; Digman, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992). Over the past decade, the FFM has become a dominant paradigm in personality psychology, yet most attention has been focused on the E(ig Five factors themselves, to the neglect of the specific traits that define these factors. In this article we emphasize the facet scales of the NEO-PI-R, discussing the logic behind their development, the evidence of their discriminant validity, and their utility in interpreting the nature of other personality scales. We also address the complexities of interpreting profiles from an instrument that provides both a global and a detailed assessment of an individual's personality. The first part of the article may appeal chiefly to the personality theorist,
22 COSTA AND McCRAE
the middle part to the researcher, and the last to the clinician interested in the assessment of individuals.
A HIERARCHICAL MODEL OF PERSONALITY STRUCTURE
In an article on the cross-cultural invariance of personality structure, Paunonen, Jackson, Trzebinski, and Forsterling (1992) concluded that "If one desires a broad overview of personality dimensions, we regard the five-factor model as most promising, but if one's theoretical or pragmatic requirements are for a more differentiated, detailed perspective, perhaps other measurement models should be considered" (p. 455). The same sentiment has been expressed by many others (Briggs, 1989; Buss, 1989; Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988), all of whom noted the greater precision of measurement, if narrower focus, of more specific traits.
What these critics of the FFM have failed to do, however, is to agree upon which specific traits should be measured. Many alternative sets of primary traits have been proposed, from the 16 factors of Cattell to the 20 Murray needs measured by Jackson's (1984) Personality Research Form. Although most of these scales can be interpreted in terms of the FFM, they were constructed without reference to it and do not represent a systematic carving up of the five-factor space. In this article we describe an approach to the assessment of traits at both general and specific levels explicitly guided by the FFM: The domain-and-facet approach of the NEO-PI-R.
The Logic of Domains and Facets
As Goldberg (1993) noted, there is a long tradition of identifying different levels of specificity in personality trait assessment. Conceptually, this is usually illustrated by the combination of discrete behaviors to form specific traits, and the combination of groups of covarying traits to form broad dimensions of personality. Factor analysts such as Guilford, Cattell, and Eysenck all adopted such a hierarchical model, although Guilford and Cattell emphasized the lower level traits and Eysenck the higher. In the usual factor analytic approach, test items were factored, usually using oblique rotations, and the obtained factor scores were then factored themselves to yield second order factors. Third order factors were occasionally reported.
In practice, this bottom-up scheme presented several difficulties. Most important was the specification of the initial pool of items. What should be included? Even large item pools may omit important aspects of personality. For example, McCrae, Costa, and Piedmont (1993) reported that there are relatively few items in the California Psychological Inventory that measure Agreeableness, and J. H. Johnson, Butcher, Null, and K. N. Johnson's (1984)
DOMAINS AND FACETS23
item factor analysis of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Hathaway & McKinley, 1983) found no factors related to Conscientiousness.
The lexical approach, in which the body of trait names in the natural language has been adopted as an exhaustive enumeration of traits, has proven to be the most fruitful guide to a comprehensive model of personality; it was in analyses based on trait terms that the FFM was first discovered. But the lexical approach has distinct limitations as the basis of a hierarchical model of personality, first because some specific traits are not well represented in the natural language (McCrae, 1990), and second because trait terms are found at every level of breadth (John, Hampson, & Goldberg, 1991), from extremely narrow (e.g., sanctimonious, sedentary, sirupy) to extremely broad (e.g., kind, weak, able). Broad terms naturally covary with many narrower terms, whereas narrower terms may not covary with each other. The result is that when representative lists of trait adjectives are factored, the broader terms account for the lion's share of the covariance, and only five broad factors typically emerge (Goldberg, 1990).
These problems are minimized by a top-down approach to hierarchical assessment. In the program of research that lead to the development of the NEO-PI-R, we began by looking for the broadest and most pervasive themes that recurred in personality measures. Eysenck's Extraversion (E) and Neu-roticism (N) had already been identified as the Big Two by Wiggins (1968), and we proposed that Openness to Experience (O) also qualified as a major dimension of personality (Costa & McCrae, 1978). A few years later we recognized the need for Agreeableness (A) and Conscientiousness (C).
Rather than use the term factors, which might apply to any level in the hierarchy, we chose to call N, E, O, A, and C domains, a term defined as "a sphere of concern or function" (Morris, 1976, p. 389). Intellectual curiosity, need for variety, and aesthetic sensitivity all concerned some aspect of experiencing the world, and thus belonged in the domain of O. Although this terminology is somewhat unusual, it is not unparalleled: About the same time, and quite independently, Digman (1979) presented a paper entitled "The Five Major Domains of Personality Variables: Analyses of Personality Questionnaire Data in the Light of the Five Robust Factors Emerging from Studies of Rated Characteristics."
We regarded domains as multifaceted collections of specific cognitive, affective, and behavioral tendencies that might be grouped in many different ways, and we used the term facet to designate the lower level traits corresponding to these groupings. Our working metaphor was the mathematical set, which could be divided into subsets by selecting different combinations of elements.
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