Every once in a while I get emails asking me about norms for the Big Five Inventory. I got one the other day, and I figured that if more than one person has asked about it, it’s probably worth a blog post.
There’s a way of thinking about norms — which I suspect is the most common way of thinking about norms — that treats them as some sort of absolute interpretive framework. The idea is that you could tell somebody, hey, if you got this score on the Agreeableness scale, it means you have this amount of agreeableness.
But I generally think that’s not the right way of thinking about it. Lew Goldberg put it this way:
One should be very wary of using canned “norms” because it isn’t obvious that one could ever find a population of which one’s present sample is a representative subset. Most “norms” are misleading, and therefore they should not be used.
That is because “norms” are always calculated in reference to some particular sample, drawn from some particular population (which BTW is pretty much never “the population of all human beings”). Norms are most emphatically NOT an absolute interpretation — they are unavoidably comparative.
So the problem arises because the usual way people talk about norms tends to bury that fact. Continue reading