Brief ReportTen facet scales for the Big Five Inventory: Convergence with NEO PI-R facets, self-peer agreement, and discriminant validity
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)).
Section snippets
Selecting a universe of potential BFI facets
The complete process by which we developed facet scales for the BFI is described below, in Section 3. However, one preliminary issue warrants special comment here: that of selecting a universe, or comprehensive set, of potential facet traits to assess using the BFI.
Different researchers have taken different approaches to the task of defining facet-level personality characteristics within the Big Five domains. These approaches have included identifying previously studied psychological constructs
Samples and procedures
Development and validation of the BFI facet scales drew on data from two independent samples.
Reliabilities and intercorrelations of the BFI facet scales
Despite their brevity, the BFI facet scales demonstrated moderate to strong reliability, as shown in Table 1. In the community sample, their alpha reliabilities averaged .72 (range = .63–.84). In the student sample, their alphas averaged .70 (range = .53–.83), and their retest reliabilities averaged .80 (range = .71–.88). These reliabilities were similar to the alphas of the longer NEO PI-R facet scales, which averaged .75 across the two samples (see Table 2).
Table 1 also shows that the BFI facet
Discussion
The present research developed 10 facet scales for the Big Five Inventory. Despite their brevity, these scales demonstrated moderate to strong levels of reliability. They converged well with both NEO PI-R self-reports and BFI peer-reports. They also showed substantial discriminant validity.
Conclusion
We are confident that the BFI facet scales will prove useful to researchers who wish to investigate personality at a level of abstraction more specific than that captured by the broad Big Five domains, especially those for whom the advantage of administering a brief measure rather than a lengthy one outweighs the disadvantage of slightly lower reliability coefficients. The scales encourage researchers to design new studies that use the BFI as a brief hierarchical measure of the Big Five. They
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