Since the pandemic, college students’ struggle with mental health concerns has increased two-fold. According to a recent college mental health survey, nearly 75 percent of college students said COVID-19 had worsened their mental health. With this in mind, a new study claims that certain personality traits helped students deal with stress better than others during the pandemic. Though the research in this area is vital, the study’s measurement tool, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), carries some clear limitations. This article takes a hard look at why it may be time to rethink personality tests like the BFI.
Below, we spotlight this new research and discuss the pros and cons of the outcomes and the limitations of the Big Five Inventory. We also look at why using a more accurate personality assessment may be the key to bolstering future research on college students and mental health.
What New Study Finds & Where to Go From Here?
The college study on stress aimed to examine how personality traits were associated with adjustment to the pandemic in college students. The sample included first-year university students who completed the Big Five Inventory personality assessment at the beginning of a semester disrupted by COVID-19. The BFI also called “The Big Five Personality Test,” includes five dimensions of individual characteristics that often appear together in people. These include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Using an app, students completed daily ratings of mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in several healthy activities, such as exercise and adequate sleep, throughout the semester both before and after the pandemic onset. Results showed that mood and wellness indices declined during the COVID period, although stress levels decreased. Additionally, regardless of COVID, improved mood, less perceived stress, and greater participation in healthy activities were significantly associated with many personality traits, including:
- Neuroticism (lower)
- Extraversion (higher)
- Agreeableness (higher)
- Conscientiousness (higher)
Mixed-effects models were used to test how personality traits interacted with changes in daily ratings from the pre-COVID to COVID period. Different impacts of the epidemic on students with low versus high levels of particular traits were also found. For instance, higher levels of extraversion were related to decreases in mood as the pandemic progressed. These results were in contrast to those with lower extraversion, for whom there was a slight increase in mood over time. The findings concluded that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in someone’s ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors.
This study suggests some crucial findings, specifically that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a part in a person’s ability to deal with stress. However, even though the Big Five is the commonly used model of personality in academic psychology, there are clear limitations with this test. These issues can affect the validity and reliability of research outcomes and conclusions. Some of the limitations are below, including:
Personality Changes Over Time
Most personality tests, including the BFI, portray personality as innate and static. But consider this – research suggests that personality traits can and do change over time. For instance, one longitudinal study found that people become more amicable, conscientious, and emotionally grounded as people get older. Over the past few decades, the idea of “static personalities” has been studied, and the findings all seem to point to the same conclusion, “We are not the same person for the whole of our life,” says René Mõttus to the BBC, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh, “Far from being fixed in childhood, or around the age of 30 as experts thought for years, our personalities are fluid and malleable.”
Social Desirability
The procedures used to determine where individuals fall on the Big Five’s dimensions are also vulnerable to bias. For example, self-report personality assessments, like the BFI, often ask participants to indicate the degree to which they “agree or disagree” with a range of statements, also known as a Likert Scale. Unfortunately, self-report biases usually exist in these types of assessments. One study found, “One vital problem in measuring non-cognitive characteristics such as personality traits and attitudes is that it has traditionally been made through Likert scales. These are susceptible to response biases such as social desirability (SDR) or the tendency to respond in a manner consistent with that which is perceived as desirable by salient others.”
The above college study findings on the correlation between mental health and personality traits were interesting and worth pursuing. However, the BFI method used to assess these traits contains limitations that may affect its scientific validity. With this knowledge, the need for an unbiased diagnostic tool is necessary, especially when evaluating stress and personality traits in students.
The Future of Personality Tests
Promoting and preserving mental health on college campuses is vital. All told, the theory behind most personality assessments can be helpful in this area of research, but their limitations make them challenging to use in practice. So, where do we go from here? Using more scientific and unbiased measurement tools may help resolve these issues. For example, assessments such as the SELC (Social-Emotional Learning Competence) Report can help students understand how the environment affects their mental health. The SELC is a scientifically valid and accurate report that assesses cognitive and behavioral traits while also pinpointing students’ academic compatibility and aptitude.
The SELC is based on the PCB (Perception – Conception – Behavior) Model. Unlike the BFI, this model tracks different ways in which the brain feels about incoming information (Perception), how it applies and interprets that information (Conception), and how the mind expresses actions based on the surrounding environment (Behavior). Thus, the model gives a topographical explanation of how each segment of the perception and conception processes is uniquely different for each person – showing granularized results. And unlike other assessments, which are often based on self-report surveys, making subjects more likely to answer with a subjective bias, the SELC offers objective test questions that are not straightforward, allowing it to measure the subject’s unbiased internal psychological characteristics. Additionally, when it comes to evaluating stress, common psychological questions are designed only to observe the outcome of the target behavior. The objective of the SELC test and our PCB Model is to capture and reconstruct the cognitive (perception + conception) process of the subject through observation of the subject’s response.
Research studies evaluating college students and mental health is essential, especially in the post-pandemic climate. However, using a more accurate diagnostic cognitive measurement tool may help improve existing and future research on college students and stress – resulting in better overall mental health outcomes.
