truity_psych OP t1_jchn3op wrote
Reply to comment by TylerJWhit in Hi, I’m Molly Owens, CEO & Founder of Truity – the personality assessment company. You can ask me anything about personality types and personality research, including the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs theory or the Big Five system of personality. by truity_psych
The Big Five is a sort of meta-theory, in that it more or less encompasses all other models of personality. For instance, Myers Briggs describes four preferences that are roughly equivalent to four of the dimensions of the Big 5.
So, I would say that there aren't really a lot of personality models that can be considered unrelated to the Big Five; many of them are different angles on similar constructs, or mashups of select parts of the Big Five.
This means a couple things—first, that any system that can be related back to the Big Five can be lent credibility by that relationship (for instance, people love to say the MBTI is bunk, but it's hard to take these arguments seriously when they ignore the fact that the constructs are so similar to Big 5). It also means that none of these systems are likely as complete or accurate as the Big 5, which has been shown multiple times to be the most comprehensive way to understand personality.
To answer your question more directly, yes, most commercial assessments have been studied for reliability and validity. Most have some predictive power, for instance results on our TypeFinder assessment show correlations with real-world outcomes like income.
However, these findings can generally be related back to similar findings with the Big Five, i.e. Judgers in MBTI tend to earn more, as do people high in conscientiousness within the Big Five. So this research is less about pitting one system against each other, and more about discovering commonalities across ideas.
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