Evaluation of a Very Short Test to Measure the Big Five Personality Factors on a Flemish Sample

IntroductionIn recent years, personality inventories have been shortened considerably. While long tests such as the California Psychological Inventory (434 items, Gough, 1987) or the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (338 items; Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008) are still in use, there is also a huge demand for shorter and thus more accessible tests. Many of the well-established tests became shorter over time or were supplemented by a shorter version. For example, the Revised NEO Personality Inventory has 240 items while its shorter counterpart (NEO Five-Factor-Inventory, NEO-FFI) contains 60 items (Costa & McCrae, 1992; 2010). Accordingly, to make the already brief questionnaire even shorter, Rammstedt and John (2007) created a ten-item version (BFI-10) of the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI; John & Srivastava, 1999) by selecting two items (one positive and one negative) from each factor from the original inventory. This was not the first attempt to create an extremely short questionnaire, Gosling, Rentfrow and Swann published a Big Five measure called Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) in 2003, consisting of pairs of adjectives. The TIPI has been adapted and validated for several languages including German (Herzberg & Brahler, 2006), Dutch (Hofmans, Kuppens, & Allik, 2008) and Japanese (Oshio, Abe, Cutrone, & Gosling, 2013). In fact, even a five-item version was considered but the authors advise against using it for several reasons as it is less reliable, has weaker correlations with other Big Five measures and other variables, it estimates the latent factors with a single item only (resulting in not being able to estimate the error terms) and also cannot balance positive and negative items (and hereby assessing and controlling for acquiescence bias) (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003). Furthermore, Rammstedt, Koch, Borg and Reitz (2004) note that good test-retest measures may be caused by memory effects which is especially problematic for five-item scales. The ten-item test still only requires a couple of minutes from the participants while avoiding most of the aforementioned limitations (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003; Herzberg & Brahler, 2006). In summary, both the TIPI and the BFI-10 have acceptable psychometric properties, especially considering their lengths. In one (relatively small) study, Furnham (2008) found that the validity of the TIPI was even better than that of the NEO-FFI.Naturally, creating very brief measures has its drawbacks, a loss of validity and reliability are most often mentioned. In recent years, the negative consequences of using short (ened) tests have been extensively studied in the literature (Crede et al., 2012; Kruyen, Emons, & Sijtsma, 2013), which is not too surprising looking at the noticeable rise in the number and use of very brief tests. It is out of the scope of the present work to discuss pros and cons of short measures in detail, nevertheless, it is important to remember that the aim of the shortened versions is not necessarily to replace the longer versions but to provide researchers and other users with an effective alternative when the use of a longer test is not feasible.However, one limitation that cannot be avoided with a ten-item test is that these tests can still only assess the highest level of the personality structure (the five factors) and are unable to address all facets of the factors separately (each of the five factors collects six facets, thus a minimum of 30 items would be needed). While these facets are all related, they represent different aspects of the factors and therefore, it would not be surprising to see lower correlations between the items within each of the factors than for the long scale. Since these correlations are sometimes used as reliability measures of the factors for twoitem scales, these reliability measures are expected to be low as well.Despite lower reliability, an argument in favour of the BFI-10 (and short tests in general) is parsimony. …