Ten facet scales for the Big Five Inventory: Convergence with NEO PI-R facets, self-peer agreement, and discriminant validity

Abstract

Scales were developed to assess 10 specific facet traits within the broad Big Five personality domains from the item pool of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). In two independent samples, the BFI facet scales demonstrated substantial (a) reliability, (b) convergence with self-reports on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory and peer-reports on the BFI, and (c) discriminant validity. These brief scales offer new opportunities for researchers who wish to assess specific personality characteristics within an overarching Big Five framework.

Introduction

One of the most important advances in personality psychology in the past half-century has been the emergence of a consensus that the most important individual differences in adults’ personality characteristics can be organized in terms of five broad trait domains: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. These “Big Five” domains (Goldberg, 1990) now serve as a common language in the field, facilitating communication and collaboration.

Since the emergence of the Big Five model, however, researchers have come to recognize that there are both advantages and disadvantages to investigating personality in terms of these five broad domains. On the one hand, each Big Five domain possesses the advantage of high bandwidth (John, Hampson, & Goldberg 1991). That is, each domain’s great breadth allows for efficient personality description, and the for prediction of many outcomes with modest-to-moderate levels of precision. On the other hand, an important limitation of examining personality in terms of the five broad domains is their low fidelity. Each domain subsumes more specific personality characteristics, sometimes referred to as facets (Costa and McCrae, 1992, Costa and McCrae, 1995). Aggregating these related but distinguishable facet traits into only five broad domains results in a loss of information—information that may be useful for psychological description, prediction, and explanation.

This bandwidth-fidelity dilemma (Cronbach & Gleser, 1957) can be resolved by examining personality hierarchically, that is, by examining specific personality characteristics within an overarching Big Five framework. To achieve this resolution, hierarchical Big Five measures are needed—measures that assess both the five broad domains and more specific traits within those domains. Some such measures have already been developed, including the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and measures scored from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, 1999). However, use of these measures in many types of research has been limited by the fact that they each include hundreds of items. To address this limitation, and thereby further promote examination of more specific personality characteristics within the Big Five domains, the present research developed and validated facet scales from the item pool of a brief and widely used Big Five measure, namely the Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991; see John, Naumann, & Soto (2008)).