The Student Readiness Inventory and the Big Five: Examining social desirability and college academic performance

This study compared the relative power of a Big Five measure, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), and a measure of academic-related factors, the Student Readiness Inventory (SRI), for predicting college academic performance (GPA) using a sample of 468 college students from 2- and 4-year institutions. The extent to which social desirability influenced construct and predictive validity was also examined. Both the SRI and the BFI were significant predictors of college GPA, but hierarchical regression results showed that the SRI scales accounted for a larger proportion of variance (range = 22% to 29%) than the BFI scales (range = 3% to 9%). As expected, the impact of social desirability on the relations between the two instruments, as well as between each instrument and college GPA, was minimal. Further evidence of the construct validity of the SRI was provided by the emergence of moderate to strong relations between the BFI (Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness) and the SRI (Social Activity, Emotional Control, and Academic Discipline), respectively.