Personality Variables

In wave 5, respondents were asked questions about their personality character traits based on the Big 5 Personality Inventory (taken from Saucier, 1994). Five scales have been created and are listed in Table 27 below. Reliability and factor analyses were undertaken, resulting in some variation from Saucier’s scales. The five scales are composed by taking the average of the following items:

• Extroversion – talkative, bashful (reversed), quiet (reversed), shy (reversed), lively, and extroverted.
• Agreeableness – sympathetic, kind, cooperative, and warm.
• Conscientiousness – orderly, systematic, inefficient (reversed), sloppy (reversed), disorganised (reversed), and efficient.
• Emotional stability – envious (reversed), moody (reversed), touchy (reversed), jealous (reversed), temperamental (reversed), and fretful (reversed).
• Openness to experience – deep, philosophical, creative, intellectual, complex, imaginative.

The higher the score, the better that personality character trait describes the respondent.

Table 27: Derived life variables

Religion

In wave 4, respondents were asked about their religion. _religb describes their broad religion classification (using the Australian Standard Classification of Religious Groups 1996).