A group of 200 elderly people were administered the EPI to determine whether the EPI items remained good measures of Extroversion and Neuroticism for older persons. Some doubt about this was induced by the realization that some items which were important indicators of E or N in younger populations would also be appropriate descriptions of behaviour changes due to old age. Overall, the average Extraversion and Neuroticism scores were found to be lower than the published norms for other groups and there was a drop of reliability of items on the Extraversion scale. This reduction increased with the age of the subjects. It is concluded that the EPI stands up well as a measure of Neuroticism but that the scale is not a good measure of Extraversion for aged persons.
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Schneider et al. (1982) studied this question.
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