Establishing the validity and reliability of the Project Talent Personality Inventory

Abstract

Project Talent is a national longitudinal study that started in 1960. The original sample included over 440,000 students, which amounted to a 5% representative sample of high school students across the United States. Previous research has not yet established the validity and reliability of the personality measure used in this study, that is, the Project Talent Personality Inventory (PTPI). Given the potential interest and use of the PTPI in forthcoming research, the goals of the present paper were to establish (a) the construct and predictive validity and (b) the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the PTPI. This information will be valuable to researchers who might be interested in using the PTPI to predict life course outcomes, such as mortality, occupational success, relationship success, and health. Study 1 found that the 10 sub-scales of the PTPI showed good internal consistency reliability, as well as good construct and predictive validity. With the use of several modern personality measures, we showed how the 10 PTPI scales can be mapped onto the Big Five personality traits, and we examined their relations with health, well-being, and life satisfaction outcomes. Study 2 found that the 10 PTPI scales showed good test-retest reliability. Together, these findings allow researchers to better understand and use the PTPI scales, as they are available in Project Talent.

The associations of birth order with personality and intelligence in a representative sample of U.S. high school students

“…Item-level data are unfortunately not available to researchers today for the entire sample (only for 4% of the sample), which is why we relied on the scale scores computed by the Project Talent staff. However, in previous work on independent participant samples of a similar age (Pozzebon et al, 2013), we established the validity and reliability of the 10 PTPI scales, and we identified how the 10 PTPI scales match up to modern Big Five inventories (e.g., John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991), to make our research more comparable to previous research on birth order and personality (see Table 1). …”

Whose Job Will be Taken Over by a Computer? The Role of Personality in Predicting Job Computerizability over the Lifespan

“…John, Donahue, & Kentle, ). Thus, Self‐Confidence ( α = .78) and Calmness ( α = .87) are most reflective of Emotional Stability; Sociability ( α = .83), Vigour ( α = .86), and Leadership ( α = .79) are most reflective of Extraversion; Culture ( α = .81) is best reflective of Openness; Social Sensitivity ( α = .85) reflects Agreeableness; and Mature Personality ( α = .93), Impulsiveness ( α = .72; reverse scored), and Tidiness ( α = .86) reflect Conscientiousness (for reliabilities and construct validation, see Pozzebon et al, ).…”

Equivalence of Narcissistic Personality Inventory constructs and correlates across scoring approaches and response formats

“…Participants in the within sample were N = 1,246 persons who took part in the Project Talent Personality Inventory (PTPI) validation study (Pozzebon et al, 2013). The sampling procedure for the validation study was designed to oversample young adults (age 20s) and old adults (age 60s) to resemble the ages of the original Project Talent sample at wave 1 (1960) and today.…”

“…The instruction was "Please click the step corresponding to the position on the ladder where you think you stand at this time in your life, compared to people in your country." In the within sample participants additionally responded to a number of other demographic questions including monthly household income and ethnicity (see Pozzebon et al, 2013).…”

“…Descriptions of the constructs can be found in Pozzebon et al (2013). The PTPI was only filled out by the within sample.…”