54 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
and behavioral flexibility (relevant to the 
action facet) failed to cohere with the other 
items on the BFI Openness scale (John, Do -
nahue, & Kentle, 1991). Thus, John and 
Srivastava (1999) found that the NEO-FFI 
Openness scale showed less convergence 
with either TDA or the BFI than those two 
instruments with each other.
The cross-  instrument validity correlations, 
computed between pairs of instruments and 
shown in Table 2.5, were generally substan -
tial in size. Across all five factors, the mean 
of the convergent validity correlations across 
instruments was .74. As shown in Table 2.5, 
BFI and TDA showed the strongest overall 
convergence (mean r = .80), followed closely 
by BFI and NEO-FFI (.75), and finally TDA 
and NEO-FFI (mean r = .67).
To determine the extent to which the va -
lidity correlations simply reflect the imper -
fect reliability of the scales rather than sub -stantive differences among the instruments, 
we corrected for attenuation using alpha. As 
shown in Table 2.5, the corrected validity 
correlations averaged .88. However, this ex -
cellent overall result masks some important 
differences. Across instruments, the first 
three of the Big Five (Extraversion, Agree -
ableness, and Conscientiousness) showed 
mean validities of about .90, suggesting very 
high equivalence of the reliable variance of 
the three instruments. However, Neuroti -
cism (.81) was notably lower. Focusing on 
the pairwise comparisons between instru -
ments, the patterns were more differenti -
ated. BFI and TDA (corrected mean r = .94) 
shared virtually all of their reliable variance, 
with the highest correlation for Extraver -
sion; only the correlation for Neuroticism 
(.81) fell below .90. BFI and NEO-FFI also 
showed substantial mean convergence (.90). 
In contrast, TDA and NEO-FFI shared less TABLE 2.5.  Reliability and Convergent Validity Coefficients for Three Short Big Five Measures: Big Five 
Inventory, NEO Five-Factor Inventory, and Trait Descriptive Adjectives
Measures Extraversion Agreeable  nessConscientious -
ness Neuroticism Openness Mean
Internal consistency
BFI-2  .87 .83 .85 .89 .85 .86
NEO-FFI  .87 .78 .85 .87 .73 .81
TDA  .87 .84 .84 .84 .82 .84
Mean  .85 .82 .85 .87 .80 .84
Uncorrected convergent validity correlations (across measures)
BFI-2—TDA  .88 .80 .84 .74 .75 .80
BFI-2—NEO-FFI  .71 .74 .80 .76 .73 .75
TDA—NEO-FFI  .69 .64 .76 .61 .62 .67
Mean  .76 .73 .80 .70 .70 .74
Corrected convergent validity correlations (across measures)
BFI-2—TDA 1.00 .95 .99 .85 .90 .94
BFI-2—NEO-FFI  .84 .92 .94 .86 .93 .90
TDA—NEO-FFI  .82 .79 .90 .72 .81 .81
Mean  .89 .89 .94 .81 .88 .88
Note. N = 438 (see Soto & John, 2017a, Study 3). BFI-2, Big Five Inventory–2 (Soto & John, 2017a); TDA, Trait Descrip -
tive Adjective Mini-Markers (Saucier, 1994a); NEO-FFI, NEO Five-Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Means 
are shown in bold .