Investigating context specificity, self-schema characteristics, and personality test validity

•Context specificity and self-concept characteristics improving incremental validity of personality measures.•Correlational study, 158 students.•Context-specific personality measures predicted over and above general personality measures.•Potential influence of self-concept characteristics on the validity of general and contextualized personality measures.

Research indicates that providing a specific context in personality measures (e.g., “at school”) improves predictive validity. This study examined this issue in more detail, investigating a broader range of outcomes and the moderating role of self-concept clarity and self-concept differentiation. University students (N = 158) completed online general and school-specific personality measures; questionnaires assessing self-concept clarity and self-concept differentiation; and measures of grade point average, leadership, and health. Results supported the benefits of using contextualized personality measures, with evidence demonstrating incremental validity for contextualized personality measures over general personality measures as well as significantly stronger relationships between contextualized personality measures and relevant criteria. Additionally, hypotheses related to the effects of clarity and differentiation were largely unsupported; however, some patterns suggested that it may be useful to continue to explore these self-schema structural characteristics in future research.