Towards an Indigenous Approach to Personality Testing: A Psychometric Evaluation of a Filipino-Contextualized Big Five Inventory

Many commonly utilize personality tests in different societal fields – clinical, educational, industrial, and others- aiming to determine individuals' behavioral, emotional, and intellectual qualities. The Big Five Model has been considered to provide a consensus approach in explaining individuals' personality traits. However, issues persist due to its cross-cultural and linguistic validity. This study focused on developing a localized personality test by acquiring the accuracy and consistency of the newly constructed test. Specifically to determine the validity of the instrument and its reliability. Using Filipino terminologies, the researcher built a pool of 310 items, which was evaluated by the six Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from the field of Psychology for the content validation of the test instrument. The Big Five Traits categorized the items – Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, each having three (3) Filipino Subscales. The evaluated instrument was administered among the first-year, secondary, and senior high school students of ISU-E through the test-retest procedure to determine its reliability. There were 113 accepted items among the 310 constructed items based on the 0.7 Scale-Content Validity Index value and I-CVI value ranging from 0.83-1.00, indicating a good content validity index. The Pre-test and Post-test have been found to have excellent interpretations based on the Cronbach alpha (α) value of 0.95. Overall, this study acquires a wide range of information regarding the quantitative values based on evaluating the newly constructed personality test targeting the students from Isabela State University-Echague.