Personality and Political Discussion

It is also common in trait psychology to substitute the term “neuroticism” for its opposite state, “emotional stability,” thus creating the acronym OCEAN: (O)penness to experience, (C)onscientiousness, (E)xtraversion, (A)greeableness, (N)euroticism.

For example, one widely used personality instrument, the NEO-PI-R (McCrae and Costa 2003) consists of 240 items.

Note that the number of cases on the community survey always equals 822, which is the number of respondents on this survey. In working on the present study, we discovered that due to a combination of coding and software errors on the part of the company contracted to conduct this survey, we are not able to identify and exclude missing cases on the Big Five items. Interviewers used specific key strokes to indicate “don’t know” and “refuse” responses, but these responses were coded to have values of 8 and 9, respectively, which also are valid values on the 0 to 10 personality scales. The survey company was able to report to us how many “don’t know” and “refuse” responses there were for each item, but, despite repeated attempts, it was not able to recode these cases so that they could be differentiated from cases with substantive responses of 8 or 9. For the ten individual personality items, there are between four and eighteen “don’t know” and “refuse” responses, with a mean of 9.9, among the 822 respondents. Thus, we know the actual average “don’t know” and “refuse” rate to be 1.2%. We have no definitive means to identify and remove these cases, and thus our analyses are hampered by the slight decreases in reliability that accompany treating all answers of “8” and “9” as genuine substantive replies.

The 2006 CES included oversampling of competitive districts. In the analyses reported below, data are weighted so that the data set constitutes a national probability sample.